Mobile typing, sorry.
Thatās nice. Again, it is a series of just-so stories that retcon ideas into post-hoc claims of āgeneticsā with little to no research.
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Oh, there is quite some research. A lot is a speculation, indeed, but the hypotheses, while poorly testable, are still mostly testable.
And youāll be hard pressed to not go post-hoc when researching existing, already evolved systems.
Whatās your favorite competing framework?
Erector.
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That was the Nicaraguan rebels.
āThey are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help. Iāve spoken recently of the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. You know the truth about them. You know who theyāre fighting and why. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not right versus left; it is right versus wrong.ā
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True, but I do think he made similar comments about the Taliban. Plenty of love to go around for right wing militias in Reagan-land!
ETA - here it is: http://www.sodahead.com/living/ronald-reagan-meets-with-taliban-in-1985/question-2310695/
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The quote in the caption is misattributed.
Fair enoughā¦ He seems to have said it about Mujahedeen (this video is kind of annoying but it gets to the point about who Reagan was talking about):
Here is an overview of uses of the term Mujahadeen:
It was a faction of the Mujahideen that broke off and became the taliban, with Pakistani backing.
Overall, the POINT is that Reagan (and Carter) had policies during the late Cold War that set us up for the world we live in today, including the backing and funding of various kinds of right-wing militias, often at the expense of local populations.
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No, Iām very critical of evo psych too, which is often implicitly dualist in itself. People think that social construction and physical changes in the brain are separate things - unless you believe in a soul, social conditioning takes place in the physical world and affects the physical brain. What we think as physical and what we think as āpsychologicalā are sort of arbitrary. It doesnāt mean our behaviour can only be affected by evolutionary pressures, though, or that Iām ādeterministicā. The physical world is dynamic and messy as hell.
Hereās a neat summary in the NYTimes about it.
Ah yeah, that makes sense. Iām just kinda passionate about this stuff because it affects how we perceive society, psychology, etc so much.
Sometimes even some people who are materialists (i.e. /r/atheist on reddit) sometimes tend to be implicitly dualist though. So you never know.
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Nope, that video is wrong, too. That Reagan quote was specifically about the Nicaraguan rebels, here:
Remarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference
March 1, 1985
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=38274
See also:
He did however, call them freedom fighters, which you can hear from his own lips in this video:
We also offered economic and military assisstance to the Mujihadeen. In the quotes from the Quora webpage you link to, Reagan made comments rhetorically linking the Mujihadeen with the Contras, even if heās not calling the Taliban, who didnāt exist, to the moral equivalent of the founding fathers. He mentioned the two groups in the same paragraph. Technically, itās true that he never called the Taliban the moral equivalent of the founding fathers, but he sure the hell is connecting what he deems freedom fighters with those fighting against governments we deem illegitimate because they were socialist or communist.
The whole of the Reagan doctrine rests on deciding who the US deems āfreedom fightersā and who they deem āauthoritariansā. It created a world in which groups like the Taliban can exist.
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It also created Reaganomics, the unfettered, unregulated freedom of the markets (read ābanksā) to drive inequality to the levels we see today. Thatcherism was inspired by and is closely related to it.
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Am I wearing a stupid sign on my face today?
[ETA] I realize that came off as harsh, so sorry about thatā¦ but Iām just wondering why Iām being told facts Iām aware of as a historian who happens to study the cold war. Iām sure you didnāt mean it that way, but thatās how it kind of came offā¦
In fact, my comment was misplaced entirelyā¦ you were attempting to build on what I was saying, not contradict me. So, my apologies.
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No worries at all. Often if a comment is replied to directly it may have a more general audience as well, for those who arenāt familiar with the details. As you say, building on it.
We all have days like that.
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A great deal of effort to use badscience to attempt to āproveā social conservative ideas through adopting their narratives and calling them āevolutionā? Might as well listen to Creationists.
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Any method in fundamentalist hands, whether they are the conservative or progressive ones, will give lousy results.
The closest I ever come to that is that I think information-rich patterns are emergent (i.e. the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts). But I remain adamant that the pattern is still always a property of the relationship between itās components, and has no existence independent of the substrate. This of course could be wrong - our logic may be faulty since itās based on how we think which may not accurately reflect the world we axiomatically believe weāre observing (Bertrand Russell covered this in detail) - but thereās no compelling empirical evidence to support Platonic independence, so I apply Occamās Razor and chose the hypothesis that introduces the minimum necessary entities.
The main problem I have with dualism, however, is that is simply implies another substrate which is somehow supposed to materially interact with the empirically apparent physical substrate, in which case it logically is the same substrate, and therefore there is no dualism. Dualism ignores basic systems logic and invents a needless paradox.
I am an atheist, but even if I werenāt, I would recognize the logic of any divinity being part of the material domain and not something independent, even it was the original part. So I donāt actually regard religion or theism/deism as an excuse for dualism.
Also, if you hadnāt sought clarification, I would never have gone back and seen where I was being unclear. I always prefer to be as clear as possible, so I appreciate your initial response to me in this thread.
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This is simply sad. The 2004 picture seems older. We assume modern world means progress and equality. Dystopia here we come!
