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> How is doing something for hundreds of thousands or millions of years a fad
It's your impression thereof that I question. People always seem to forget that hunter gatherer societies got more of their calories from hunted vegetables, starchy tubers, etc than from the actual meat itself. A diet based on a hunter gatherer lifestyle would be interesting to study, but paleo is just a misinformed caricature of what humans ate back then.

But honestly, your argument that paleo isn't a fad reminds me most of the whole "Christianity isn't a religion -- it's a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" thing.

Seriously though, eat whatever you want. I'm not even saying paleo is unhealthy (indeed, I suspect most people would be well served by reducing their starch intake), though my intuition is that it varies a lot from person to person based on a number of factors (if you're going through 5000 calories a day I sure hope some of them are clean burning starch rather than pure protein and fat, less of an issue on 2k). I'm just saying exactly what the article title says: stop using cavemen to justify your fad diet.

Paintings tend to be more like caricatures, not photos

Yes you are right, I could barely tell the difference between those cartoons and the Mona Lisa, or any other portrait.

Face recognition algorithms (at least the ones that work well enough for practical use) recognize faces based on exact shape and appearance. Humans often use characteristics and qualitative deviations from "normal" faces. That's why humans have no problems recognizing caricatures like these: http://tinyurl.com/d8pq9f6 Computers can't do that yet. Paintings tend to be more like caricatures, not photos.

And face recognition in Facebook usually only has a few dozen people to choose from, with a high probability that the same faces occur again. In art, you have tens of thousands of faces and a low probability that any one occurs multiple times.

You seem to have mistaken me for some caricature you have built in your mind. I have never in my entire life said the US invaded countries to get cheap oil - that is your narrative, not mine, my friend.

I don't know why people believe such illogical things, but reducing the supply of something never makes it cheaper, and turning a major oilfield into a series of flaming holes always reduces the supply of oil. Did you think Bush fils and pere were both unfamiliar with basic economics? Did you think their Texas Oil Baron constituency wanted oil to get cheaper? It's nonsensical.

So, ask yourself: What three countries recently tried to break the petrodollar? What happened to them? Do you know, without Google? If not, you have no idea what is going on in world politics.

Sorry I'm confused. If you look at entertainment, and divorce rate, and the adult industry, they are billion if not trillions of dollars. The hypocrisy is the public face that people try to maintain. I contend that the money speaks for itself and only a few people are wanting to be the arbiters of information, they are vocal and use public shame and guilt to try and impress their standards. They are so off base as to be caricatures of old Puritan ethics that we in the world have been trying to shed for hundreds of years. (at least most of us).

Here's what "idea guys" don't realize: Their idea is very unlikely to be unique. If it is, it's very likely to be complete shit.

"Idea guys" is a caricature. An accurate one in some cases, admittedly, but inaccurate in many others.

Many people may have the same idea, but only a small fraction have the wherewithal to turn it into a successful business. Even if you have had the same idea, the chances are that you don't have the business skills, marketing skills and so on to turn it into a sustainable source of revenue.

A start-up's NDA is not to protect the idea from other programmers. It's to protect funders from the risk of other businesspeople who have the resources to build the same business faster.

It constantly shocks me what "ideas" get turned into successful businesses. I had the software idea behind Facebook. Many of us probably did, especially those who already knew about The Well. We didn't do it because a) we had better things to do, b) there was no obvious way to make a living off it, and c) we didn't know how to run a business anyway.

What never occurred to me was the business model idea behind Facebook, namely, selling the privacy of your clients to the highest bidder. It is, as you say, complete shit. But some people spend 16 hours a damn day there. Who knew, right?

Libertarians are not the enemy of anyone except Big Brother. Their whole mantra is to leave people to their own devices.

Libertarian nonsense. Who has interest in caricaturing government as such (the principle of government or government as it should work) as Big Brother? You got it: corporations. Corporations, despite the disaster of the 2007 economic crisis, still want even less regulations.

Indeed libertarians want people left to their own devices: their own individual devices, with any attempt at collective will and power quashed.

We have begun dismantling our public institutions under the Reagan and Thatcher cool-aid. Happily the 2007 crisis has had the effect to awaken people who thought that there was some good in there.

Nonsense.

This is the part where the logic fails for me. It's a form of self-hatred to assume that everything that comes of Man's impact on the environment is necessarily unnatural and therefore bad.

This is an idiotic caricature of the actual concerns. It is more along the lines of "sea level rise resulting in the inundation of some of the most populated and valuable areas of the world is bad." It would be bad if it were due to a natural source, too. Fortunately, since it is a result of human actions, there is actually something we can do about it

But only if we are smart enough to understand what the actual concerns are, instead of indulging our prejudices with stupid caricatures.

I'm on board with the spirit of your comment, but I can't help but pick nits anyway. In a way I want to sharpen the argument you're trying to make, but I guess it can also serve as a caricature of the purely rational.

Anyone who uses the sentence "It is raining.", when asked about the weather is accepting the existence of some nebulous magical "it" that creates the rain. If somebody was really, consistently avoiding all magical thinking acts, they would carefully correct themselves and say "There is rain." instead.

A lot of the figures of speech used as examples in the comments here can fairly be considered "magical thinking", but I think this one misses the mark. "It" is always shorthand; in this case "it" is shorthand for "the weather", which in turn is shorthand for "the observable climactic events in my vicinity" (or the vicinity being discussed). "There is rain" plainly doesn't mean the same thing—it just means "rain exists". Or, since we're going to absurd lengths in analyzing figures of speech, "rain is there", wherever "there" is. And this sort of absurdity can recurse through each rephrasing as all language is abstraction.

On learning that the days of the week or months are named after supernatural beings, they would consistantly attempt to correct that fact.

I'm not sure why this would be the case. Weeks are entirely arbitrary in the first place, and apart from their social utility there's no rational basis for having them or naming their days at all. Given their utility, I suppose "oneday" and "twoday" and so on might be more appropriate in a vacuum, but I doubt anyone considers the original meaning of the weekdays' names, in which case any naming scheme would be arbitrary; I'd argue that rationality would favor familiarity over a renaming with no benefit. And a purely rational redesign of the week might tend toward a ten-day week (to align with our most familiar number system), but the social harm that might do is probably not rational either.

Months are similarly arbitrary. Their basis in the lunar cycle has been undermined by aligning them to an unrelated solar cycle, and ultimately their only purpose is also social utility. And again I doubt anyone considers their names' meaning in regular use. And again it's conceivable that we could implement a lunar month system with a numbered naming scheme, but again I think it would cause social harm (especially as it encourages cognitive dissonance when squaring it with the solar year; in which season is Oneuary this year?) and again undermine its own rationality.

We know the intent in the case of the Jim Crow laws, because we know who wrote them and why they were written.

I'd argue that we don't need to know those things to understand the racism of the laws. Even if it were a law that came from on high, if the consequences were predictably racially biased, the law is racist, whether it mentions race or not. I don't know, for example, much about the people behind US drug law, but the effects are quite clearly racially biased; the laws are racist.

Am I a racist for expressing this view?

In a vacuum, as you've articulated it, I couldn't really say (but I'd probably guess yes). But in the context of your promotion of ignorance about obvious racially charged innuendo, I'm inclined to believe that you are clearly exhibiting prejudice. Perhaps it's prejudice you don't understand, but it's still there.

Is the very phrase "gangsta thug culture" somehow a racially black concept? I'm still bewildered that you seem to think so, given the antics of Eminem and a host of disaffected, youthful Caucasian wannabes.

It's a completely meaningless concept, except the cultural implications it carries. On a Venn diagram, the overlap between dominant culture perception of "gangsta thug culture" and "urban black culture" would be almost total, whether it's true or not. That there are people who aren't a part of "urban black culture" who identify with "gangsta thug culture" doesn't change this dominant culture association. This is how innuendo works: you don't have to spell out exactly what you mean if your audience already shares your particular biases.

As an aside, while it's been a long time since I actively listened to Eminem, I am straining to recall anything particularly "gangsta thug" about his lyrics. At least in his early work (with which I'm more familiar), his voice seemed to be pretty unique in the rap/hip-hop milieu at the time. Yes, there was some subject overlap, presumably because he shares a lot of experiences with what black rappers/hip-hop artists were discussing, but there were a lot of themes that were more in line with a caricature of "poor white culture". What was so fascinating was that he was able to walk a fine line by attracting audiences from many cultures, without alienating a lot of the rap/hip-hop community by appearing to make a mockery of the genre the way so many other white rappers have.

I'm reminded of a cover of the National Review, shown here, which depicted Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, in the style of racist caricatures of Asians, a style you'd see in newspapers in the 1920s or 1930s. A lot of people complained, particularly Asian-American groups, naturally. About that time, I saw a television news show featuring a spokesperson from an Asian-American group, and the editor of the National Review. The editor said that, as the Clintons were not Asian, the cover could not be racist, and then he went on to accuse the spokesperson of racism, for suggesting that caricatures of the Clintons resembled Asian people.

It was the most spectacular demonstration of arrogant sociopathic sophistry that I can recall.

Thank you for giving us The Nation magazine's strawman caricature of Goldberg's thesis. What he actually writes about are things like:

The socialist roots of Mussolini's (and other fascists') beliefs, in particular the similarities and differences between fascism (national socialism) and communism (international socialism), and the ease (noted by both sides) with which people adapted themselves when they moved from one group to the other.
The demand by both fascists and progressives that the individual submit himself to the group (for the progressive side of that, read some John Dewey or George Bernard Shaw), and the belief that group endeavors/goals are somehow "higher" than individual ones.
The "totalitarian" nature of the belief systems in the original sense of the word, meaning that it is all-encompassing; compare Mussolini's "everything within the State, nothing outside the State" to the more modern liberal "the personal is the political."
Agreement between fascists and the progressive moment on important issues. No, not trivial things like vegetarianism, but significant ones like eugenics and government control of the economy.
A tendency of both fascists and progressives to imbue civilian undertakings with military rhetoric and symbolism. Not as prevalent today, and conservatives aren't innocent (cf. the War on Drugs), but it was much more widespread among progressives during the first half of the 20th century. Do a search for "Blue Eagle" sometime, for example.

It's a shame Goldberg couldn't have written it with nearly as much understanding (and a tenth as much hard evidence) as you have (which by the way is 1/10 of 0).

But if you read those bullet points, and think about them for a minute in light of the past 30 years of politics in the US, you'll see that with guys like Goldberg, it's always projection. It's part of the intellectual legacy of Newt Gingrich, that whatever your greatest disgrace, the answer is always to accuse the other side of it and then run away. Recently, this approach has been seen in Paul Ryan's accusation that President Obama is trying to destroy Medicare. It requires a level of shamelessness that is seldom found in the wild, but it seems that brass is something never in short supply in the world of the Right. Remember, "Obama is a racist" and "Obama wants to kill your grandma". Those were the greatest hits of 2010, and delivered with absolutely serious faces, which is itself something of an achievement.

Further,

The demand by both fascists and progressives that the individual submit himself to the group (for the progressive side of that, read some John Dewey or George Bernard Shaw), and the belief that group endeavors/goals are somehow "higher" than individual ones.

That's nothing like the current calls for Republicans to ignore the fact that a big government moderate is running as their party's nominee, and vote for Romney is absolutely critical if you're "on the team". In other words, ignore you own personal beliefs, because it's more important that "we" win.

And this doozy,

Agreement between fascists and the progressive moment on important issues. No, not trivial things like vegetarianism, but significant ones like eugenics and government control of the economy.

And of course, not like trivial things like the right-wing corporatization of politics and privatization of the military and law enforcement, as well as militarization of the police. When I see the American Left (as named in Goldberg's subtitle), the first thing that comes to mind is "Eugenics". In fact, hasn't Eugenics been a platform of the Democratic Party for the past 60 years? Sadly, No.

But this one is the winner and champeen:

A tend

Today, the intellectual leader of the National Review Online is the well-known Doughy Pantload, Jonah Goldberg. Raised like a veal in a whorehouse by the famous harpy Lucienne Golberg, Jonah Goldberg is best known for his weighty tome, "Liberal Fascism", which puts forth the case that liberals are like Hitler because National Socialism has the word "socialism" in it and Hitler was a vegetarian and all liberals are vegetarians so it's not the corporate Right that are fascists, it's really the liberals, neener neener neener.

Thank you for giving us The Nation magazine's strawman caricature of Goldberg's thesis. What he actually writes about are things like:

• The socialist roots of Mussolini's (and other fascists') beliefs, in particular the similarities and differences between fascism (national socialism) and communism (international socialism), and the ease (noted by both sides) with which people adapted themselves when they moved from one group to the other.
• The demand by both fascists and progressives that the individual submit himself to the group (for the progressive side of that, read some John Dewey or George Bernard Shaw), and the belief that group endeavors/goals are somehow "higher" than individual ones.
• The "totalitarian" nature of the belief systems in the original sense of the word, meaning that it is all-encompassing; compare Mussolini's "everything within the State, nothing outside the State" to the more modern liberal "the personal is the political."
• Agreement between fascists and the progressive moment on important issues. No, not trivial things like vegetarianism, but significant ones like eugenics and government control of the economy.
• A tendency of both fascists and progressives to imbue civilian undertakings with military rhetoric and symbolism. Not as prevalent today, and conservatives aren't innocent (cf. the War on Drugs), but it was much more widespread among progressives during the first half of the 20th century. Do a search for "Blue Eagle" sometime, for example.

You can disagree with Goldberg all you like, of course, but your characterization of his book is extremely dishonest.

The purpose of a church is to be a moral authority. Societies degenerate badly without some sort of moral authority. There nothing wrong with a group simply saying "we think X is right and Y is wrong, and you're not welcome among us unless you at least try to toe the line": that's more or less the basis of civilization.

The idea of teaching people to defer moral decisions to a third-party authority, rather than making their own best effort to be a decent person and follow the golden rule, scares me greatly. I say this as someone who grew up as a church-going, ${DEITY}-fearing religious adherent, and today is none of those things.

As a lone agent, moral decisions can be hard: I have to consider the perspectives, positions, intent and rationale of those around me; to think hard about my actions, how those actions impact others, and the consequences thereof. At the risk of caricaturing the opposing view (and to be sure, a great many religious people have extremely nuanced views on morality), there aren't any easy shortcuts: "${AUTHORITY} says that ${FOO} is good, so my actions are clearly justified"; nor, "${PERSON} is an agent of ${ENTITY}, so I can disregard their positions without further consideration". Can I decide that someone else's actions are harmful to others or otherwise wrong? Certainly. At the same time, the frequency with which I do so is distinctly limited to times when such harm is real and unwelcome, and when the consequences of my decision to condemn are themselves things I consider morally acceptable.

Moreover -- in a society in which individuals are moral free agents, moral arguments can be freely defined through discussion and debate. If I disagree with someone about, say, the merits of the SlutWalk movement, that should be something we can talk about -- not just name-calling debate but genuine effort to understand the other's views and find some middle ground. Argument from authority lends a rigidity to one's perspectives making them resistant to refinement -- a rigidity which tends to result in an unwillingness to consider harm to others which may result from the stances one takes, and an unwillingness to take into account the grey areas and nuances make up the world as it is.

I don't by any means argue that churches have no right to take moral stances. I do argue that making those moral stances overly rigid, and teaching them in such a way as to encourage argument from authority rather than discussion and debate, is a harmful activity and counterproductive to the goal of having a robust and morally self-aware society... and I am not at all convinced that I agree that such authorities are necessary to maintain prevent "societal decline".

THIS is what you are arguing FOR.

All I'm arguing for is an accurate understanding of exactly what the decision was and the actual logic behind it (and resulting exceptions), without all the hyperbole and conspiracy theories that keep getting bandied about. I haven't commented on whether I wish it were different or not; I'm just pointing out how it actually is, as opposed to the "ZOMG!!eleventy-one! The sky is falling! The Supreme Court ordered that everyone in the country be strip searched daily!" nonsense. Not that the parent I replied to was guilty of quite that level of hyperbole, but still, the actual Opinion in question is being ignored by most commentators, who are instead relying on sensationalist stories put out by media agencies looking to bump ratings/revenue. What I'm arguing for is actually reading, understanding, and discussing what the decision was in reality as opposed to sensationalized caricatures of it.

Thankfully, this is not the case in U.S. If you're threatened with significant bodily harm or death, it doesn't matter if the attacker uses a gun, a baseball bat, or his bare fists to do so. It seems rather irrelevant to me, in any case - what matters is the intent of the attacker to harm you and his ability to do so, not the tool he uses to achieve that effect.

But that is exactly the same case as here in the UK, which Americans caricature as somewhere where you can't lift a finger to defend yourself.

In fact, you can use a roughly equivalent level of force to defend yourself. If someone is attempting to punch you, you can punch them back. What you can't do is draw out a handy samurai sword and cut their fucking head off just because they look at you funny.

But if someone attacks you with a samurai sword, you can pretty much do what you like ito defend yourself, although shooting them would be problematic as you would have to have an illegal handgun to do so.

Same in the UK. You can get a pap smear within a day as well, as long as you're willing to go private. You'd have to pay for it, unless you have insurance , but you'd still get your pap smear. It'll cost you about £200 (~$320) and they also measure your cholesterol, perform a breast exam, etc.

At any rate, what does your anecdote prove? That someone, somewhere, might have been harmed by rationing? You can find such horror stories in all systems. I'm sure I can find someone in the US who was concerned about their health and didn't go to a doctor until it was too late because they didn't insurance and didn't want to pay hundreds of dollars. In the meantime, when you have a public system, it's important to make sure that resources are not misused. That means making tough choices: is the risk of misdiagnosis and false positives (which will bring up costs, not to mention scare some people to death) greater than the risk of missing some cancers? You could potentially screen everyone for cancer every year or even every month. Would that make any sense? Of course not, so screening is targeted based on evidence about who would benefit the most from it. I say that's the best way to design a system that has to make the best use of the limited resources that it has at its disposal.

The whole thing about death panels has never made any sense to me. Why on earth are *Republicans* complaining that the government is spending *less* money and reimbursing *fewer* procedures? That's their whole platform: less government spending! If their caricature were correct, the UK system would be amazing: a very bad, stingy system for the hoi polloi (a little like showing up at the ER in the US), which means that government will not spend too much on healthcare, and a very generous private system as long as you're willing to pay for it. Isn't it what they should want if they really cared about small government rather than pandering to the "get your government hands off my medicare" crowd.

The only thing people "know" about the CIA's abilities is whatever Hollywood dreams up for movies and TV gimmicks.

As an outsider, my caricatured perception of government intelligence is a bunch of failed lawyers tallying various stats and counting down the minutes to their next smoke break. Recovering data from an erased hard drive seems well beyond the reach of any federal employee I've ever met. Maybe the top engineers at Western Digital could pull it off, but they have better things to do like cramming more bits onto a fucking platter.

Frankly, the Samurai were a privileged upper-class of the 16th-18th century. And even then, most men who could call themselves "Samurai" were really basically accountants or family members, of the very upper echelons, who perhaps spent a lot of time studying martial arts, and zen philosophy, because they had nothing better to do with their time, because they had the peasants doing all their work for them. When the gun came, the Shogun dispensed with the need for sword and spear-wielding footsoldiers. Just like in Europe. These Samurai were really more of a liability to central power, than an asset. As long as he had them glued to the idea of tradition, he could keep them captivated. But that would only last so long. It was amazing that they preserved that as long as they did.

OF COURSE - the "concept" was revived in Imperial Japan, in the 20th century. As a means of propaganda, to get the Japanese people on-board with the fascist expansion of Japan's projection of power in the Pacific and Asia. It was also very convenient to motivate the soldiers to fight with an extreme frenzy of self-sacrifice and obedience, and even to get substandard pilots to use suicide-attack tactics when they were desperate, and they had more surplus equipment, and had lost most of their best pilots towards the end of the war.

But this is VERY much the same as some jackass American tobacco-chewing punk from Tennesee who wears boots (made in China) and drives a pickup truck, and watches NASCAR, and listens to country music, and calls himself a "Cowboy", and MAYBE rode a horse a couple of times in his life. We all love the idea of "rugged individualism" in this country, don't we? (but few of us "rugged individualists" would actually be "down" with Teddy Roosevelt's ideals. . . ).

At some point, the obsolete cultural legends of the past become nothing more than caricatured lifestyle stereotypes - betraying how completely empty and bankrupt, and devoid of identity our present culture is.

The part I liked was this theory that some evil character might use facebook ads to find openly gay men by targeting their demographic with ads, hoping they fall for those ads, then somehow trying to convert their clicks to identities with real contact info... so, what, they can go commit a 'hate crime'...?

Even for crazy SOB's, that's about the worst plan ever. Like, villain in a TV special, dumb.

Cue the squads of well-meaning, evangelical, gay "de-programmers" in three...two...one...

Woosh. Missed the point...

Umm, ok. The GP points out that the TFA posits cartoonish, caricature bad guys. So then you respond with a different set of cartoonish bad guys?