On religion and the last liberals.

Note: This is a short paper I wrote last year. Parts of it may be wrong, but I thought it would still serve as a conversation starter. I hope you will find it provocative. I must repeat my standard disclaimer: Just because I wrote it, or said it, doesn't necessarily mean that I believe it.

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe…”
– H.G. Wells, Outline of History: The Whole Story of Man

Introduction

Using methodological techniques and data forms from the field of behavioral genetics, Alford, Funk, and Hibbing showed compelling evidence that genetics plays an important part in shaping political attitudes and ideologies (Alford et al 2005). Specifically, by comparing the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins, the authors were able to mathematically estimate the shaping influence of genetic versus environmental factors. Of their many interesting findings, I will consider the following in greater detail: 1) Genetic transmission frequently affects clusters, or “packages”, of political attitudes, and 2) Genetics accounts for approximately half (53%) the variance in the “index of political Conservatism”. Motivated to understand the potential consequences of these startling conclusions, I will first explore the concept of group selection as revealed in the Sidanius and Kurzban chapter. Following on, I will consider aspects of political conservatism that suggest a possible role for group selection. In the third section, I will discuss the research of Satoshi Kanazawa, which viewed in the light of Alford et al’s findings may point at some group selective pressures affecting liberals. Finally, I will make some concluding remarks, including a short bit of commentary.
Understanding Group Selection

Sidanius and Kurzban define a “group” is “any set of individuals that have a fitness impact on one another” (p.151). Importantly, a degree of relatedness is not part of this definition. In my mind, the clearest evidence of group selection in nature is symbiotic relationships between species. Group selection within a single species, however, is trickier. Two theories of group selection establish a basis for group selection in humans: multilevel group selection and cultural group selection. According to multilevel group selection theory, nature can be said to select for an entire group if, despite some relative advantage/disadvantages between internal phenotypes, members of all phenotypes are on the whole more successful in passing on their genes than individuals belonging to other groups. As the authors explained, this is not “an alternative to the genic view of ... selection,” but rather is “simply another way of … keeping track of genes’ success by looking at their relative replication rates within and between groups” (p. 152). Regardless how the score is kept, the critical factor is the proportion of genes of one phenotype relative to genes of alternative phenotypes in the total population of the next generation.
Alternatively, group selection can proceed according to the processes of cultural group selection (p.162-3). Boyd and Richardson elegantly articulated three conditions for cultural group selection to occur: 1) groups adopt cultural norms and everyone in the group follows them; 2) by chance, some groups have adopted norms that are on the whole beneficial to the group, whereas other groups have adopted norms that are on the whole detrimental to the group; and 3) there is some conforming process by which individuals in groups are compelled to adopt the norms the group has previously found successful. I say these conditions are elegantly articulated because they each correspond to and preserve the logico-deductive relationship between the three fundamental premises of evolution generally: i.e., variation (1), differential fitness (2), and heritable traits (3). As any logician would insist, if you hold all three of these premises to be true, you must infer evolution. In the cultural case, the first two conditions are clearly acceptable. Regarding the third item, they assert that a “conformist tendency” evolved to carry out this function (p. 163). While I find the arguments and evidence supporting this hypothesis compelling (and will here accept it as true), it is reasonable that others might remain unconvinced. I do not wish to digress too far, but it seems worthwhile to point out that if the existence of genetic basis for such a tendency was conclusively demonstrated, cultural group selection must be inferred and summarily added to the canon of evolutionary theory.
Group Selective and Conservatives

So if there exists a “package” of genes involved in political conservatism, it will be an interesting exercise to consider its characteristics as they pertain to group selection. I shall discuss three specific points that suggest the “group” of individuals possessing the package may enjoy greater reproductive success than groups possessing alternative packages.
Focus on the Family

Political conservatism (excluding libertarianism) has over time demonstrated intense concern over matters related to reproduction. As a group, conservatives tend to be fiercely opposed to policies that introduce individual, arbitrary discretion into reproductive matters. This includes opposition to sex education, which is statistically the most effective means of reducing the number of “unwanted” pregnancies, as well as opposition to birth control, distribution of contraceptives, and abortion. In general, political conservatism is at odds with the women’s liberation movement, and promotes more traditional roles for women as homemakers instead of breadwinners. Religion plays a strong part in maintaining and promoting these norms. In a recent empirical study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Weeden et al concluded that the central function of religious attendance in the United States is to support a high-fertility, monogamous mating strategy (Weeden et al (2008). Specifically, they argue that Christian churches in the U.S. facilitate reproduction by promoting social norms that resolve the differential reproductive challenges faced by males and females. For males, who are by design more preoccupied with paternal assurance, the church produces females who forgo all mating opportunities except those with her husband, to whom she is to give unrestricted sexual access. For females, the church produces men who value their role as a breadwinner and will agree to remain monogamous. In so doing, the high level of paternal assurance makes monogamy a more successful reproductive strategy for males, while the high level of resource security works out well for females.
Flags, fish, and 4x4s: Reinforcing extended kinship

Another common feature of political conservatism with group selective implications is an affinity for symbols of group identity. According to Sidanius and Kurzban, “cultural badges such as social customs, traditions, …styles of dress, haircuts, language, and dialect” may play a role in achieving social conformity (p.163). In so doing, they reinforce notions of “socially defined kinship” and establish a stronger basis for large-scale cooperation. According to Weissner (1998), socially defined kinship was “a critical adaptation of homo sapiens. It permitted the construction of broad social security networks for risk reduction by granting access to human and natural resources lying outside the group. Losses due to fluctuations in natural resources, inability to find mates, conflict, and so on, could then be absorbed by a broader population (p. 163).
Enforcing conformity

As the Alford data suggested, political and social attitudes are only partially inherited. And further, group members may not find themselves drawn to the right set of cultural badges and symbols. For such situations, there appears to be a set of adaptations designed to enforce conformity. Specifically, I refer to punishment mechanisms that achieve the effect of altering the decision calculus of individuals, such that they will chose to conform if nature failed to compel them. For example, in an experimental setting Shinada et al show that punishment behavior is likely to be directed at group members who are found to be noncooperators in a system of social and economic exchanges. Further they show that punishment is more severe for in-group members than out-group members (Shinada et al 2004). This finding compels reflection on the everyday observation, corroborated extensively by academic research, that conservatives tend to favor more severe punishments for violators of social norms. This may take the form of disproportionate support for stricter criminal sentences (i.e., death penalty, mandatory minimums, etc), or in a purely social context increased frequency of “hate” based discrimination and violence (Green 1999, Altemeyer 1988, Feldman 2003). In other research, Kurzban emphasizes the profoundly social nature of punishment, especially in response to perceived violation of social norms, such as morals. In an experimental setting, he showed that people are likely to hand down more severe punishments when there is an audience. This may be interpreted as either a “demonstration of the consequences”, so as to dissuade others from behaving thusly in the future, or because the punisher is afraid his punishment will be insufficiently severe to appease the indignant group (Kurzban 2006). Or it may be both. In either case, these findings illuminate the circumstances of an American church where conformity is frequently achieved through the subtle, socially administered punishments for incorrect behavior, especially via gossip and attacks on individual’s reputation in the community (Weeden et al).
Reluctantly reproducing liberals

The above arguments identify factors which could potentially give a conservative package of genes a competitive advantage vis-à-vis alternative packages. In this section, I will consider some factors affecting a “liberal package”, if indeed there is one.
At the 2009 Northeast Evolutionary Psychology Society annual conference, Satoshi Kanazawa presented his research on the evolution of general intelligence (also published in the Psychological Review, 2004). His research relied on an unusual dataset containing individual level information on a wide-variety of life-style habits and attitudes—along side IQ scores administered when the respondents were children. According to his data, individuals with high IQs were more likely to partake in an astonishingly bizarre variety of activities and attitudes. High IQ individuals were more likely to be smoke, stay up late, commit suicide, or do drugs. Especially important in the context of this paper, high IQ individuals were more likely to be homosexuals, have abortions, forgo opportunities to have children, be celibate, get PhDs, take birth control, choose education and careers over homemaking. Things that high IQ people did less frequently included participating in competitive sports, engage in sexual activity, hunt, socialize, and so on. Based upon his findings, Kazawawa advanced the theory that general intelligence evolved as an adaptation to help individuals resolve “evolutionarily-novel” problems; i.e., general intelligence as domain-specific adaptation for the “limited sphere of evolutionary novelty in the ancestral environment.” This theory was supported in his data. High IQ individuals were more likely to participate in every activity that could not reasonably be related to an adaptive challenge an early human ancestor might have faced. Further, the relationship was monotonic: the higher someone’s IQ, the more likely they were to do something they were not evolved to do. In many cases, obviously, this included things that were detrimental to their chances of reproductive success.
Kanazawa’s result comports with Alford et al’s piece on political genetics, and illuminates potential implications on the notion of “need-for-cognition”. In Alford et al, the authors muse “It has long been known that certain political issues seem ‘hard’ to people and others seem ‘easy,’ … because some issues trigger ‘gut responses’ while others do not” (p. 164). In light of their findings, they suggest that the “easy ‘gut’ issues tend to be those that are more heritable” (p. 164). In other words, they are easy because it is not necessary to deliberate, or it is preempted by impulse. Looking at his data, I would like to extend his analysis on this observation. In a very haphazard mini-experiment, I went down the list of items in (table 1 in Alford), marking with red ink the items that—on my best guess—we likely related to an adaptive problem faced by our primordial ancestors. Alternatively, I marked with green ink items that appeared to only make sense in the modern context, or are evolutionarily novel. As expected, there is a lot more red ink at the top of the list (most inheritable) than at the bottom (least inheritable). The relative intensity of color toward the top comports with Tesser’s finding that attitudes higher in heritability are manifested more quickly and are more resistant to change (Tesser 1993), leading to lower variance. Visually, it looks like a color-gradient that is a deep red at the top and slowly fades to a ruddy green.
In hind sight, I should have used a blue pen for the latter. With the exception of abortion, the list is surprisingly well-ordered (from the bottom to the top) along a left-right ideological dimension. The top of the list is a tight cluster of highly salient, conservative issues beginning with school prayer and property taxes, followed by ‘moral majority’, capitalism, and astrology (mysticism, or religion). From the bottom (left) moving up, we have federal housing, modern art, abortion, divorce, democrats, nuclear power, busing, segregation. Gay rights, as an issue that the left has always been ambivalent about (“don’t ask don’t tell”) is according to this scale a left of center issue, which seems valid.
What this suggests, in sum, is that conservative genes are on average more heritable than liberal ones, if indeed there are any. More likely, liberals are simply the ones who, by chance or because their parents lack them, are not inheriting the genes. This view suggests that the disproportionate “need-for-cognition” observed among liberals may be because they simply lack the “gut” instincts conservatives possess. In other words, they have to think things through because nature gives them no cues. That is not to say they will arrive at better decisions, but the arbitrary nature of the process will inevitably result in higher variance in attitudes among liberals than conservatives.
As measured IQ tends to be higher among liberals than conservatives, these conclusions are consistent with Kanazawa’s theory that general intelligence evolved to allow individuals to resolve evolutionarily novel challenges—and perhaps there may be a relationship. This question, however, will have to wait until another day.
Conclusions

From this analysis, I conclude that the “political conservatism package” of genes likely enjoys a significant adaptive advantage over alternative packages. Not only are conservative traits more heritable than alternatives, they appear to be doing a better job driving the reproductive success of their hosts. With modern birth control and pregnancy-termination methods, liberals are imperiled with a need-to-cogitate over evolutionarily novel problems that are bound to result in maladaptive decisions. Indeed, the outlook for homo literaticus looks grim.
Yet there is cause for hope. Evolution is a very slow process, and other dynamics may be in play elsewhere in the world. For example, this is all likely irrelevant in China which has for more than a generation instituted a 1-child policy. But furthermore, Alford et al’s findings estimate that the conservative package of genes is only 53% heritable. That gives us 47% to work with.
To make the most of this, we should begin to think in terms of public policy goals. Goals should include making sex education mandatory and outside the control of local school districts that may oppose it. Education in general should place greater emphasis on critical reasoning skills that properly equip young people to deal with fallacious arguments. In terms of social policy, we should enact policies ameliorate the circumstances that force women to choose between careers and maternity. For example, providing high-quality, publically funded childcare for as long as needed.
But why should we act? As a result of some statistical fluke, a small piece of the universe woke up from eternal slumber to briefly ponder its own existence. This is us. Beingness is something evolution can’t have accounted for. Once we discovered it, we compromised the system—like a test subject who amidst an experiment realizes what is going on. For a brief moment, our destiny is our own. We have existential freedom. As far as we know, we are the only beings in the universe to have ever done this. Let this not be a blink of an eye and a return to non-beingness, but the start of something greater.


Works Cited

Alford, John R., Carolyn L. Funk., and John R. Hibbing. 2005. Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review 99: 153-67.
Handbook, Chapter 5. Sidanius and Kurzban.
Shinada Mizuho, Toshio Yamagishi, and Yu Ohmura. “False friends are worse than bitter enemies: “Altruistic” punishment of in-group members”. May 2005.
Kanazawa, Satoshi (2004) General intelligence as a domain-specific adaptation. Psychological review, 111 (2). pp. 512-523.
Kurzban, Robert, Peter DeScioli, Erin O’Brien. “Audience effects on moralistic punishment”. Evolution and Human Behavior. March 2007
Feldman, Stanley. 2003. Enforcing social conformity: A theory of authoritarianism. Political Psychology 24: 41-74.
Altemeyer, Bob. 1988. Chapters 1-3. Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Weedon, Jason, Adam B. Cohen, and Douglas T. Kenrick. “Religious attendance as reproductive support” in Evolution & Human Behavior, September (2008) Vol. 29, No. 5, Pp 327-334

Should political scientists care what happens in 39 milliseconds?

In a word, ‘Yes’. I believe this is a bit like asking if physicists should care what happens at the picometer scale (atoms range from approximately 30-500 picometers in diameter). Just as it would be impossible to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the physical world without a model of the atom, it is impossible to build a robust understanding of human behavior without a model of cognition, which takes place at the scale of milliseconds.

Argument:
There is increasing evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience that some of our decisions are prepared preconsciously in the brain some time before we are consciously aware of the decision. For example, split-brain patients (who have had the bridge between the hemispheres of the brain surgically severed) can be queued to initiate actions in such a way that the message avoids parts of the brain commonly associated with consciousness. Not only will they carry out those actions, but they will remain unconscious of their reason for doing so. Interestingly, the disconnected areas of the brain associated with consciousness may spontaneously invent justifications for doing so, i.e., a patient may (honestly) believe he got up to get a coke, rather than having responded to a queue. This phenomenon may or may not take place at speeds of 39 milliseconds, but what it demonstrates is that humans can say and do things for true reasons they may be totally unaware of.

According the psychologists, these sorts of unconscious decisions and judgments may constitute a vast domain of behavior. Moreover, these decisions and judgments can be manipulated externally and studied empirically. For example, it can be shown that affective judgments (those pertaining to feelings) are not only determined preconsciously, and may be manipulated through subconscious priming, i.e., by the presentation of stimuli for ultra-fast durations, such that the object is perceived but remains “unseen” by the conscious mind. These “affective reactions” are made not only without any apparent conscious effort, they are made more readily and with greater confidence. Political scientists should take note because these effects don’t stop at gate before the realm of political decisionmaking. For example, Lodge and Taber show compelling experimental evidence that subconscious priming can significantly alter subjects’ judgments over political figures and issues. In another study, Payne found that racial primes enhanced people’s sensitivity to threat related objects, such as weapons, in images. The implications of this finding are disconcerting, considering that every year a number of unarmed civilians are mistakenly shot and killed by police officers.

Best alternative argument:
Here I will consider what might be the best alternative position. Political science need not be concerned with what happens in 39 milliseconds because the primal unit of politics is a behavior, which does not take place at that scale. Only behaviors, not internal physiological events or hypothetical constructs such as the mind, can be directly observed. Thus, behaviors themselves should be the basis of scientific descriptions of politics. Moreover, the phenomena political scientists are ultimately interested in are macro-phenomena, i.e., we are not concerned merely with the behavior of individuals, but rather we are interested in high-level interactions between individuals (in aggregate) with society. The specific determinants of individual behavior aren’t of interest to us, rather we are only interested in the measurable, categorical correlates that predict political outcomes.

Response:
While the ability to probabilistically predict political outcomes based upon categorical statistics may frequently prove useful, this should not be confused with actually understanding politics. Rather, these may only be considered as heuristics. I assert that the goal of science is not heuristics, it is understanding. Long ago people who studied politics decided that they wanted to be ‘scientists’. Perhaps they were envious of advancements made in the physical sciences, and were impressed with the elegance and parsimony of their mathematics. While mathematics is frequently necessary for the practice of science, it is not sufficient. In other words, simply adopting the language of mathematics alone is not sufficient to establish a science of politics. I propose below three premises concerning a science of politics.

(Rule 1) Within the realm of science, there are no domains of questions that exist on their own. All “sciences” are connected to one another.
(Rule 2) Politics is a domain of behavior, therefore it is can only be understood within the context of behavior generally.
(Rule 3) Behavior is a domain of biology, and therefore it can only be understood in the context of biology generally.

Questions in science are vertically (and perhaps horizontally) integrated, where one level of questions may be explained in terms of another, ultimately reducible to the same ‘theory of everything’. For example, history may be reducible to politics, politics may be reducible to economics, economics to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics, and physics to mathematics. Therefore, a robust understanding of one domain at any level is ultimately nested within a network of knowledge-domains.

One proof of these three rules is the observation that human beings are not the only species that does politics. *In fact, one might postulate a 4th rule: A science of politics is necessary species general, i.e., not arbitrarily bounded around the study of a single species, however unusual or special they believe themselves to be. Politics is something that exists in nature and appears to be a consequence of interaction. Because outcomes of interactions can be either positive or negative, we may infer that interaction establishes selection pressures on behavioral adaptations to achieve the greatest balance of positive to negative outcomes. The most likely location of these adaptations will be at the brain, and the most likely relevance of these adaptations for the study of politics is at the heart.

Conclusion:
Scientists are the legacy of the philosophers, who began a quest with a simply stated (though achieved only with great effort) goal: to understand. In 2500 years since Greek philosophers first began to ponder which was the primary element of the world, philosophers and their decedents have continually sought to probe deeper, following threads as far as they will take them. In physics, this has lead to models of phenomena so large and so tiny that the physical (and temporal) spaces in which they occur can only be grasped loosely in the forms of metaphors and symbols. Similarly, I argue that a true science of politics necessarily delves to depths of neurons, or even genes if that’s where the connections lead. This is the logical destiny of science applied to politics. If this unacceptable to political science, they should revisit their decision to become a science. In sum, I have argued that the extent to which political scientists care what happens at 39 milliseconds is, perhaps the same question as ‘the extent to which political scientists are actually scientists.’

Approaches to human nature

The matter of cooperation is a key subject of interest in virtually every social and behavioral science, as well various biological and animal sciences. To this grand question of human nature, each discipline applies its own unique approach rooted in that department’s favored methods, perspectives, and discourses. In this short discussion, I’d like to draw upon two such approaches; specifically, I will contrast the political-economic model, and another model which I will loosely call sociological.

Taking Ostrom, Hardin, or Orbell as examples of political-economists, this approach is highly theoretical, beginning from a “bottom-up” extrapolation of the nature of cooperation beginning with first principles. The logical progression from these first principles are often then explored with mathematical modeling, laboratory experiments (on human or other live subjects) or with computational simulation. Though political-economics have advanced considerably since the reign of absolutist rational actor theories, this approach is still deeply rooted in the idea that human beings are agents, utilizing some cognitive aptitude to assess the pros and cons of various behavioral strategies and identify an optimal course of action. For potential courses enabled only via some form of cooperation (i.e., a social dilemma), humans will employ their trademark ingenuity and devise a social-technology (i.e., norms, promises, altruistic punishment of defection, agreements, laws, etc.) capable of corralling a herd of independent-minded agents who are naturally reluctant to cooperate .

This “bottom-up” approach contrasts with what may be described as a “top-down” approach common to sociology and other animal behavioral sciences. Unlike political-economists who have inherited the traditional modus operandi of the economists, i.e., to begin from first principles, sociologists tend to start with direct observation of the animal itself, in its natural habitat. In some ways, what they observe is a quite different picture of humanity than what the political-economists present. Far from being reluctant cooperators, the sociologists see cooperation as an essential characteristic of the species. In their view, cooperation comes as natural to human beings as swimming to a fish, or burying acorns to a squirrel. We do it, quite simply, because its our nature to do so--it’s “in our genes,” and not simply in a manner of speech. From early-childhood, we are perpetually, actively seeking out others with whom to cooperate. Figuratively speaking, there is an invisible force of social-gravity that draws individuals toward on another. Perhaps the major difference is cooperation isn’t something that is achieved via a social-technology, it is the default presumption; cooperation is the default stance we humans take against the various ecological, interpersonal, and intergroup challenges we face. We are not individuals in nature, we are a lattice structure--an array of beings that survives in numbers. For our ancestors, if you were not part of a group, you were dead (and thus not one of our ancestors).

To facilitate and deepen cooperation, we invent value systems and entire cosmologies that we can all share. These intellectual constructions may accentuate similarities or common challenges, while exacerbating differences with respect to out-groups. We have rich verbal and physical means of communication that allow trust to grow from an initial seed (a smile), to a sappling (small talk, trivial banter), to robust cooperation (secrets, valuable knowledge, loyalty). Importantly, all of this is done unconsciously; we do it without even thinking about it. The slightest knowledge of group membership (like estimations of numbers of dots on a screen) can significantly alter behavior. Next time you are in a coffee shop listening to two individuals smile and banter back and forth about absolutely nothing of consequence, be assured that that despite appearances something very important is going on: they are trust-building, watering the seed of cooperation.

In sum, political-economists insist--and show compelling justification and evidence--that the temptation to defect is real. At the same time sociologists have collected vast data showing that the drive to cooperate is real. Logically, these views do not seem to be mutually exclusive. While it is in our nature to cooperate, we are not immune from the temptation to become “the first among equals”, get ourselves and our progeny a bigger, better piece of the pie. I’m reminded of John Godfrey Saxe’s re-telling of the Indian parable of the elephant. Six blind, wisemen from a distant province encountered an elephant for the first time. One man felt at the trunk, and said that this beast must be like a snake. Another felt its leg and figured it must be like a tree. Another felt the tusk and imagined it like a spear, and so forth. For me, this discussion reinforces the importance of an interdisciplinary (or perhaps non-disciplinary) approach to the grand question. Like the six wisemen, we may each have an important piece of the puzzle. If we are ever to them together and finally produce the rich understanding of human nature that has arguably been our greatest, most noble ambition, then we must take a lesson from our ancestors and eschew the temptation for each of us to go it alone. Rather, we are all of us bound together by a higher purpose, to delve the mysteries of nature and extract from it true knowledge of who we are, where we came from, and why we are here.

Explaining Glenn Beck to an exceptional 14 year old.

Today an exceptionally bright 14 year old came to me and asked, "Who's Glenn Beck, and why did he have a rally?" As I considered how I would reply, it occurred to me that a quick response wouldn't do and that understanding who he is would require some knowledge of the context in which the phenomenon known as Glenn Beck is taking place. Here is my response, which I thought I would share with you. *Note: her name is substituted.

This is a very good question, Molly. I know you're a precocious and inquisitive person, so I'll presume that you have already looked up him up on Wikipedia and, like me, found that the most straightforward answer isn't very satisfying.

The most straightforward answer, of course, is that he is an influential conservative radio and television personality with close ties to the Tea Party movement. He is very popular these days and communicates with a lot of people on his radio and television programs. In general, he says that government should be very “small”. In other words, the government should collect very little taxes and not try to do a lot of things such as make rules for companies to follow, provide healthcare, and give people some money when they lose their jobs. His argument is that if people don't have to pay taxes, they can afford to do all these things themselves without the government's help and they can do it better and cheaper. The problem is these issues are 1) very complicated and difficult to understand, and 2) tend to arouse strong racial feelings. You see, most of these polices are designed to “help the poor by taxing the rich” (kind of like Robin Hood). A lot of white people that may have only a limited understanding of the issues think that the government is “taking their money” and giving it to poor people who don't deserve it. It's racial because in their view who “deserves it” frequently depends on what color their skin is. For example, they often believe the stereotypes that African-Americans are poor because they are lazy and don't work hard, and that illegal immigrants come here for free education, healthcare, and to steal our jobs.

Molly, one thing about people is that they tend to prefer to listen to people they agree with and ignore information that contradicts their view. The problem is the more people hear information that agrees with their view, the more and more they believe it. Glenn Beck says things that confirm in white peoples' minds that their problems in life are the fault of brown people. For example, when Barack Obama was elected president, a lot of white people were afraid that he would try to take all their money away and give it to black people, so Glenn Beck told everyone on television that Barack Obama “hates white people, and the white culture”, suggesting the he has some secret agenda to hurt them. Sometimes he even says things that make people think Obama is connected with “terrorists” who want to attack and destroy America. The more they listen to Glenn Beck, the more they feel the whole world--Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, and even Europeans, are attacking America from the inside. Consequently, a lot of white people got really paranoid and started organizing clubs for white Christians so they could feel safe.

Though most white people don't think like this, when you count all of them that do all across the whole country this still adds up to a lot of people. With the help of companies who don't want the government to make rules that they have to follow, these groups have used the Internet to find each other and organize into even larger groups. When you have “groups of groups” coming together, sometimes this is called a “movement”. In this case, we call it the Tea Party movement. For a lot of Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck is like a rock star. So when they wanted to have a big rally in Washington, putting Glenn Beck as the main event causes lots of excitement and draws many people to come see him and participate. This is why “he” had a rally in Washington.

Still, I don't know if anything I have said rally “answers” the question you asked me: who is Glenn Beck? I have talked about the things he does as best as I can, but I don't think we can understand 'who' someone is until we understand both what they do and importantly 'why they do it'. The thing is when Glenn Beck talks, everybody listens. People who agree with him love him, people who disagree with him hate him. Either way, they listen. Before Beck started talking about politics, he was a radio “shock jock.” A shock jock is someone who says very shocking things that people just can't stop listening to—usually because they just can't wait to hear if the next thing he says is even more shocking. A long time ago he would do things like call up a woman on the phone and laugh at her for having a miscarriage or make fun of an unarmed Black man who was shot by a police officer.

In my opinion, Glenn Beck is and always has been a man who will do or say anything for money. Recently, he has been discovered for having extraordinary talent as a propagandist. This is someone who deliberately talks about the news in a way to shape people's opinions about politics. This is a very, very valuable talent, and some very powerful and rich people support have hired him to shape peoples minds about many issues, from tax policy to rules that companies have to follow. He is now very rich and famous. I believe this was his only objective. Things just happen to work out that he is also a very prominent person in America and may have a big impact on our future.

I hope my explanation helps, though I hope you will consider what I've said to be just an "introduction". You will continue to hear and read about him for quite some time, and this may help you understand what you're witnessing. Ultimately, you will need to formulate your own opinions about him, based upon your total experience and unique way of thinking.

Good luck!

Liberal hypocrites.

Two criticisms conservatives frequently levy against liberals and progressives are that we 1) make them feel stupid, and 2) we are hypocrites. I'm not going to comment on the first point, save only to recall Isaac Asimov's musing on the subject:

"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

Conservative stupidity, however, isn't the purpose of my writing. Rather, the focus of my remarks will be on the second point: that we are hypocrites. I concur in this judgement. We are, in fact, total hypocrites. Let's just imagine, for a moment, what it must be like to listen to us drone endlessly on about malevolent corporations hijacking the government, oil wars and failure to launch any meaningful effort to mitigate climate change? We call them stupid for not listening to us, and they rightly call us out for the beneficiaries of these same injustices we decry. How many "liberals" in Washington, DC one way or another get their salary from the Defense Department budget? We're hypocrites because we know the wars are about oil, and we still go to work everyday doing our little part in the "War on Terrorism". We criticize corporations like Verizon and Google trying to destroy Net Neutrality, but we own Google and Verizon. That is to say, we own their shares. Which oil companies are you invested in via your mutual funds? And won't you throw a hissy fit when their CEO comes out and must inform you that their companies failed to turn a profit this quarter.

The median income in the US as of 2008 is roughly 31K. How many of you make more than that (or at least expect to make more than that when you graduate. If you're reading this blog, you are/will most likely (be) making two or three times at your fancy professional jobs--actuaries at insurance companies, stock managers at CitiGroup, researchers and sales-reps at GlaxoSmithKline, ratings analysts at Viacom, or engineers at Northrup Grumman. It's no wonder that we're not out protesting in the streets when we're the beneficiaries of an unjust system.

Here's a tip that might help you identify whether you are part of the problem you decry: Would you be fired if you were found out to have attended a protest at a G8 summit? If your boss saw you standing on the side of the street raising a sign that said, "no more blood for oil" would you be getting a talkin' to? No, we're not out in the streets, we're 35 floors up in an air-conditioned offices, and have no mind to rock the foundations of our fortune. What is perhaps more hypocritical still, is the expectation that as we look down on them through one-way glass panes, they should be able to tell the difference between us and the billionaires who we say are responsible for their houses getting foreclosed on, their job getting sent-away overseas, and their lack of adequate healthcare. This is a tall request for someone we have the nerve to call stupid.

Loyola Marymount study finds that Second Life relationships can be more satisfying that real world ones

From Virtual World News

Second Life Relationships More Satisfying Than Real Ones

Participants in the 3D virtual world Second Life are more satisfied with the romantic relationships they form in the virtual world than the ones in their real life, according to two studies conducted by Loyola Marymount Universityresearchers. Even more remarkably, Second Life users who participated in the study reported that their level of sexual satisfaction with virtual world relationships was roughly equal to what they experienced in their real world relationships. Read more...

Full article: http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2010/08/second-life-relationships-more-satisfying-than-real-ones.html
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More evidence that people can have real and satisfying emotional experiences within virtual worlds. I don't mean to imply that I think virtual lives are in anyway superior to "real" lives. Rather, that virtual worlds constitute a new living space for the mind, unaccompanied by the body. With our feet still firmly planted in the real world amidst real lives, our consciousness may extend into a second, perpendicular plane of existence simultaneously. Such an existence may seem an awkward stretch for many of us older birds, but for our children who will have been introduced to virtual worlds when their brains are still spongy, may find themselves perfectly at home with their consciousnesses striped across numerous realms.

-Nick

Competing ecosystems.

Apple is typically the company that comes to mind when one talks about a software 'ecosystem'; i.e., an effort to put all software and hardware together in a single, coherent package affording users all the capabilities they could ever need. Within a software ecosystem, individual applications pass data to each other seamlessly from the user's point of view. Perhaps even more importantly all applications share a common user-interface experience making it possible for users to competently use a variety of diverse software with a single common skill set; if you can use one, you can pretty much use them all.

It occurred to me today as I perused my daily RSS feeds via Google Reader on my Google Android phone, I'm utterly immersed in Google's software ecosystem. Why does this feel somehow ironic? Perhaps it is because Google is supposed to be the anti-Apple. Where Apple tries to micromanage the user's experience within the confines a "walled garden" ecosystem, Google (supposedly) works by connecting you with the world. But does it really? More and more I find that all the programs I use are Google. This is a Google-owned blogging site, and I chose it primarily for its simple integration with my Gmail account. While, I find the provided creation tools sufficient for my purposes, I might have composed my thoughts using the now revamped and impressive GoogleDocs suite. Apple doesn't even have one of those!

I realize that I'm glossing over the undoubtedly real and consequential distinctions between these two companies. Google actually does earn the large part of its revenue from connecting people with new things, whereas Apple makes its money by selling people computers. Yet my point of all this is simply that the term 'ecosystem' ought to be attached to Google as well. Ordinarily, this would hardly seem worth writing about, but given that heretofore Apple has pretty much owned the term, and further that Google is in some contexts characterized as the anti-Apple, it may help us to construct a better model of what is actually going on between these two giants. Both are ecosystems, and they're competing for your inhabitation. Underlying both of their business models is that they can each provide you with everything you could ever need or want. Consequently, you will never have to stray far from Google's ads or Apple's hardware.

Now if you will excuse me, I have several Google Voice messages waiting.