I'm having a hard time picturing any culture that celebrates the "everyman". The "strong leader" is pretty much a universal cultural archetype. The precise qualities of the leader may differ somewhat; some cultures value a sober and reflective leader, some may value an extrovert, but in general the leaders most cultures put on the pedestal with the epithet "the Great" were the charismatic leaders; the Hannibals, the Alexander the Greats, the Julius Caesars, the Charlemagnes, the Frederick the Greats and so forth, and while all these men had abilities far beyond charisma, the one thing they had in common was charisma.
When charisma is married to ability, well then you have the classical "great leader", but even some of these great leaders produced almost as much chaos as they produced great works; Alexander certainly built a vast empire, one of the greatest of classical times, but he also brought much wrack and ruin, and not even the glorious language his final march from India back to the Mediterranean can't hide the fact that even his troops were beginning to question his brilliance.
Julius Caesar was a pretty damned good example of a man whose capacity for double-crossing and betrayal is almost without peer, and he still remains one of the most problematic leaders in history. So while he is one of history's "great leaders", to the powerful in Rome he was a right pain in the ass, to the point that even one of his closest friends plunged a dagger into him.
Have a pretty vile ethos doesn't make one a sociopath, and people can commit or oversee horrific acts without being sociopaths. Fanaticism, for instance, may involve a whole host of abnormal psychological issues, and still not be sociopathic at its core.
The Administration certainly feels it does, including the radar tracking data showing where the attack originated from. But I get it, you've bought into the "Russia is a wonderful country and USA bad bad bad!"
Don't really care what you think. The ASsad clan have been murdering bastards for decades, and Russia, who was supposed to be the guarantor that Assad's chemical weapons were taken out of commission is left makign lame excuses about how some rebel gas cannisters got blowed up reall good.
Face it, Russia is on the losing end of this one, and Putin knows it, so cash your Kremlin checks while you can.
There was plenty of circumstantial evidence, and that's what nailed Nixon to the wall. It wasn't merely that he tried to coverup the Administration's involvement in the break-in, it's that there was enough *indirect* evidence, including the tape erasure (and the ridiculous explanation for how it happened) to point a finger pretty firmly at Nixon being at the heart of the whole affair. The kind of weasel language Nixon defenders always bring up was getting pretty old even by the time of his resignation. Certainly no one in Congress actually believed any of it.
Putin overplayed his hand, and misjudged just how recalcitrant Congress really is over Russia. Maybe Putin misjudged the US political system (he certainly wouldn't be the first Russian ruler to do that), and just assumed that Trump's cooing sounds and his installment in the White House would just erase seven decades of deep distrust between the Washington and Moscow. Maybe he knew it, but Trump was his best shot. Whatever the case may be, Trump is in a political position now where he has no choice but to pick up the anti-Russia stick and pound it loudly. The fact is that outside of a few Congressmen like Nunes, Trump actually has few real devotees in Congress, and it's clear Congress has absolutely no intention of permitting the Administration to jump into bed with Putin.
Enter Assad's gas attack, which gives Trump the cover he needs to basically switch teams. Whether it's a serious change of heart or not has to be seen, but I'm thinking that right now in the Kremlin Putin and his aides are actually generally worried that they may have aided an actual real-live warmonger to get into the Oval Office. And maybe that's not a bad thing. Russia has largely assumed since Putin's rise to power that the US is going to steer clear of any elevated tensions, and has seen itself able to do what it pleases from the effective seizure of South Ossetia to the out and out annexation of Crimea, and of course, going into Syria to make sure Assad stays in power regardless of any other circumstance. Now it actually has to wonder what the Command-in-chief of the most powerful military machine in history might do. For once, Putin is the one knocked off balance.
Wow, now there's a bit of historical revisionism. Watergate was more than just a coverup, it also lead directly to the Oval Office as the source of the whole conspiracy, not merely just the coverup of the break-in. Any "exoneration" of Nixon comes from the fact that investigators could find no direct evidence that tied Nixon to the actual DNC break-in scheme. The whole matter of 18 minutes of erased tape has long been since as the smoke that lead to the fire that was Nixon's direct involvement in the entire scheme. We can never know for sure, but I can't imagine any reasonable person can draw any other conclusion than that Nixon and his senior advisers were all in on the break-in.
I'd rather put it that certain classes of problems require quick solutions, even where an optimal solution cannot be worked out. So yes, I agree that some situations demand immediate decisions, and then you try to figure out how to make that solution work in the medium term. By the same token, the "decision paralysis" overanalysis is certainly a grave risk where a crisis is approaching. Firemen are a classic example of where you have a few rather basic rules, along with an understanding of the physical properties of fire, and you use them to make rapid decisions, some of which may be suboptimal, or ultimately outright wrong. However, when coming up with fire codes, one does have some luxury of time to come up with reasonable rules that prevent deaths, and maybe even prevent firemen from having to make dangerous snap decisions to begin with.
When it comes to government, as I say elsewhere, you're usually dealing a vast society unto itself, with its own inherent momentum and rules, and changing that system requires a very good understanding of motivations, systems of control and accountability, so when you get some populist who declares "I'm going to throw it all out and make it better", you're not dealing with someone who is taking a calculated risk, as a general or a firefighter might, you're dealing with someone who is simply replacing competency and knowledge with hyperbolic chest thumping.
A general may have to make snap decisions, but if they're not decisions based on knowledge of tactics, in other words they're not just random commands made simply so there are commands going down the chain of command, then that general is likely to doom his army. Even snap decisions have to come with some ability.
Absolutely. One only has to look at the US Constitution, which was largely written by large land holders with fundamentally agrarian interests. While the Industrial Revolution was taking off in Britain, and there were nascent industries in the American Colonies, by and large they were still fundamentally agrarian societies. That tension between industrial and agrarian lifestyles was just beginning when the Constitution was put together, and reached the boiling point in the Civil War. Non-mechanized agriculture requires a large labor pool, and very often an indentured one. Slavery was the very emblem of pre-industrial agriculture, and it's destruction was the hallmark of the victory of industrial society over agrarian society. The more swiftly industrializing North could far more easily dispense with the need of indentured workers (though not entirely, despite the mythologizing of the Union), whereas the still almost classical agrarian Southern society was still addicted to the drug of cheap, indentured labor.
I don't see any correlation between sociopathy and exploratory urges or public debate. Sociopaths don't tend to worry about long-term consequences at all, which is how they usually get found out. Sure, they come in with their magnetic personality and certainly convince people that they have the qualities of a good leader, but their fundamentally anti-social nature and general disregard for other people, not to mention their poor impulse control, usually out them soon enough. They can, of course, cause a great deal of damage in the meantime. I don't think being a sociopath is a requirement of being a contrarian, and indeed, while I find contrarians do usually have pretty inflated egos, the ones I've met (admittedly anecdotal) still seem to abide by basic social norms and usually seem fairly sincere (in other words, there's none of that narcissistic self-aggrandizing). And I see absolutely no connection between sociopathy and wanderlust.
I have heard the argument that certain occupations may give those on the more narcissistic end of the spectrum; for instance neurosurgeons, where an ability to disregard the supreme risks of screwing around with someone's brain is actually of an advantage. I'm not sure I entirely buy that, but if it is the case, then it's only a pretty small number of occupations where being an out and out sociopath or psychopath is actually a good thing.
That fact has been observed for centuries now in the English-speaking world as centralized authority gained more and more power. By the same token, when you talk about the President, Congress and the supreme Court, you're also talking about the top layer of governance. Even the Cabinet is a sort of senior management. Governments themselves are actually astonishingly difficult to reform, and politicians who come in with fevered barnstorming declarations of how they're going to "drain the swamp" or whatever grand promises they make, swiftly discover that the vast overarching edifice of government has its own peculiar momentum, and that while change is possible, it is enormously hard, and requires a great deal of hard work, compromise, and acceptance that evolution is usually better than revolution.
I think we're seeing the education of a President in real time right now. While most previous presidents have been members of the political class, and whether at the state or Federal level have some understanding of the mechanics of government. Trump is a true outsider, with little in the way of pertinent previous experience, and so his first few months have been a pretty harsh education in the powers of the Presidency, and just as importantly in its limitations. How successful he ends up being is greatly dependent upon HIS ability to alter the way his own behavior. I see some evidence of a shift in the White House, as the would-be revolutionaries like Bannon are eclipsed and their influence wanes.
Are you saying that observed psychological phenomena don't have evolutionary roots? Evolutionary psychology isn't exactly a "left field" discipline, and a lot of time is spent studying other species to try to determine the roots of human behaviors.
As to "values", there is very little consistency in time and space, even where religious affiliation has remained constant. Five hundred years ago virtually every Christian society permitted some sort of indentured worker, and even two or three hundred years ago, slavery was practiced by plenty of God-fearing Christians. Women were basically chattel until the beginning of the 20th century in most Christian jurisdictions, and many Christian societies were overtly racist.
Five hundred years ago being seen as a heretic in Italy meant you had a high risk of ending up being burned alive, and nowadays the Catholic Church officially decries capital punishment, not just for "thought crimes" but even for murderers.
Certainly there is some commonality between different civilizations in the nature of moral codes, simply because most societies have been confronted with similar problems and a limited number of solutions. But the underlying rule of social animals, whether they be the great apes or other species, is that there be rules. The rules themselves have been highly variable in time and place, and codes of conduct we would find abhorrent were common place in ancient times, even among the Judeo-Christian peoples, to the point that even by the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, early Christians created a sort of "escape" clause to get them out from under the more prohibitionary Hebrew legal rules by declaring Jesus had "completed" the Old Law, and had this nice new law, though Christians have spent the last two thousand years debating which of the Mosaic Laws still apply and which don't.
And this sort of cultural and moral evolution has taken place in every society, simply because, like it or not, morals evolve over time, and religious and secular authorities need to maintain the relevance of a society's set of beliefs by constantly retconning the rules of conduct.
There's no doubt that the evolution of H. sapiens certainly came with significant behavioral changes, but even our species, for much of its time, has spent it in small groups. Large societies, and in particular complex dense urban societies, are a very recent innovation, and the evolution of governing such societies has been one of either trying to map instinctual dominance hierarchies on to these large populations, or try to find ways to circumvent them.
I'm having a hard time imagining the last US president who could be considered "humble". I think Truman probably was, to some extent (or at least he was a reasonably miserable fellow, a sort of an American version of Clement Attlee), as was Hoover. Washington is portrayed as humble, but I can't imagine a military commander of his ability actually being humble; generals are just not known for their humility, but generals who are bred in war have to be both charismatic and able.
The problem with democracy is that any would-be political leader has to have those hubristic "alpha" qualities that people, often wrongly, associate with great leaders. The advantage of democracy is that you can get rid of them, although a really bad political leader still will usually have at least one term to screw things up.
This is how I read it as well. A lot of neurological and psychological machinery evolved in a considerably different habitat than most humans now live. We're wired to be hunter-gatherers; small and generally fairly mobile groups where leaders were far closer to those that they lead. If you look at other primates, and in particular our closest relatives the Great Apes, you can see how a combination of physical strength and bravado are usually what make for an alpha male; basically the tribal leader. But in those relatively small groups, challenges to the leadership are relatively frequent, so that a shit leader isn't going to last very long at all.
Civilization has rewritten the rules, in no small part because what's good for a tribal hunter-gatherer society like our ancestors or like chimpanzees, just doesn't scale up at all. But our every instinct, written over millions of years of hunter-gatherer society, remains attracted to charisma (and physical appearance as well). We really are still just hairless apes; big brains, but a lot of social instinct that gets in the way, and it's going to take a lot longer than the mere 10,000 years or so that we've been developing urban civilization to evolve a different psychological toolkit.
All that counts is an objection was made. For the denier, it is irrelevant if the objection is sensible, rational, or even has anything to do with the topic at hand. So long as they raise their hand and making some vaguely intelligible sound, apparently a whole field of scientific inquiry comes crashing down.
The problem with the "small increase in temperature" line is that it doesn't take into account the actual sheer amount of energy required to raise mean surface and lower atmospheric temperatures even a fraction of degree. Climate pseudo-skeptics and the idiots that follow them don't acknowledge, because it kills their entire line of reasoning, that upping global mean temperature even a quarter of a degree means the atmosphere is trapping vastly greater amounts of solar radiation.
And of course, for ocean-life there's a double-whammy, in that not only are ocean temperatures increased, but the oceans begin to absorb more CO2, altering pH levels. In the short term, the oceans can act, both due to their capacity to absorb heat and CO2, to mitigate rising temperatures, but it's only short term, and the costs to marine ecosystems is huge.
At any rate, even the deniers are beginning to end the denialist game. Now it's all about "Oh sure, the Earth is warming, but what can we do, and what about those funny little brown people, why does Al Gore hate them so much?" They've entered the whole "eat drink and be merry for tomorrow will shall die stage", simply because they want to eke a few more years or decades of profits out of fossil fuels before the game is up.
And then you're going to be confronted with Java code, which is everywhere. The fact is that Java is in a helluva lot of places, and I can't imagine anyone disadvantaging themselves by continuing to develop in it. Frankly, other than as an interesting aside, what's the point of learning Scala?
The secret to producing a dog is to encourage continued juvenile behaviors; neoteny. A wolf is actually a pretty useless pet, while they are a social animal, they are high strung and unreliable. However, as likely happened the other times wolves have been domesticated, those wolves who are a little less high strung, who can form even a marginally stronger social bond with humans, will be tolerated, whereas the wilder members will either be killed or driven off. And really, it actually only takes a few generations for a canid to essentially be domesticated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now obviously this experiment is to intentionally domesticate a canid, but the fact remains that encouraging neoteny doesn't actually seem that hard, and so long as a wolf could prove to be of some use, and is tolerated, there's at least a chance of domestication. And so far as I understand the molecular data, it suggests this has happened multiple times. As well, there is still gene flow between wild canids and domesticated dogs to suggest that the process might even be shorter these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Bucko? I feel like the Fonz is about to walk in, elbow the jukebox and two cute girls will appear, one on each arm.
I'm having a hard time picturing any culture that celebrates the "everyman". The "strong leader" is pretty much a universal cultural archetype. The precise qualities of the leader may differ somewhat; some cultures value a sober and reflective leader, some may value an extrovert, but in general the leaders most cultures put on the pedestal with the epithet "the Great" were the charismatic leaders; the Hannibals, the Alexander the Greats, the Julius Caesars, the Charlemagnes, the Frederick the Greats and so forth, and while all these men had abilities far beyond charisma, the one thing they had in common was charisma.
When charisma is married to ability, well then you have the classical "great leader", but even some of these great leaders produced almost as much chaos as they produced great works; Alexander certainly built a vast empire, one of the greatest of classical times, but he also brought much wrack and ruin, and not even the glorious language his final march from India back to the Mediterranean can't hide the fact that even his troops were beginning to question his brilliance.
Julius Caesar was a pretty damned good example of a man whose capacity for double-crossing and betrayal is almost without peer, and he still remains one of the most problematic leaders in history. So while he is one of history's "great leaders", to the powerful in Rome he was a right pain in the ass, to the point that even one of his closest friends plunged a dagger into him.
Have a pretty vile ethos doesn't make one a sociopath, and people can commit or oversee horrific acts without being sociopaths. Fanaticism, for instance, may involve a whole host of abnormal psychological issues, and still not be sociopathic at its core.
The Administration certainly feels it does, including the radar tracking data showing where the attack originated from. But I get it, you've bought into the "Russia is a wonderful country and USA bad bad bad!"
Don't really care what you think. The ASsad clan have been murdering bastards for decades, and Russia, who was supposed to be the guarantor that Assad's chemical weapons were taken out of commission is left makign lame excuses about how some rebel gas cannisters got blowed up reall good.
Face it, Russia is on the losing end of this one, and Putin knows it, so cash your Kremlin checks while you can.
There was plenty of circumstantial evidence, and that's what nailed Nixon to the wall. It wasn't merely that he tried to coverup the Administration's involvement in the break-in, it's that there was enough *indirect* evidence, including the tape erasure (and the ridiculous explanation for how it happened) to point a finger pretty firmly at Nixon being at the heart of the whole affair. The kind of weasel language Nixon defenders always bring up was getting pretty old even by the time of his resignation. Certainly no one in Congress actually believed any of it.
Putin overplayed his hand, and misjudged just how recalcitrant Congress really is over Russia. Maybe Putin misjudged the US political system (he certainly wouldn't be the first Russian ruler to do that), and just assumed that Trump's cooing sounds and his installment in the White House would just erase seven decades of deep distrust between the Washington and Moscow. Maybe he knew it, but Trump was his best shot. Whatever the case may be, Trump is in a political position now where he has no choice but to pick up the anti-Russia stick and pound it loudly. The fact is that outside of a few Congressmen like Nunes, Trump actually has few real devotees in Congress, and it's clear Congress has absolutely no intention of permitting the Administration to jump into bed with Putin.
Enter Assad's gas attack, which gives Trump the cover he needs to basically switch teams. Whether it's a serious change of heart or not has to be seen, but I'm thinking that right now in the Kremlin Putin and his aides are actually generally worried that they may have aided an actual real-live warmonger to get into the Oval Office. And maybe that's not a bad thing. Russia has largely assumed since Putin's rise to power that the US is going to steer clear of any elevated tensions, and has seen itself able to do what it pleases from the effective seizure of South Ossetia to the out and out annexation of Crimea, and of course, going into Syria to make sure Assad stays in power regardless of any other circumstance. Now it actually has to wonder what the Command-in-chief of the most powerful military machine in history might do. For once, Putin is the one knocked off balance.
Wow, now there's a bit of historical revisionism. Watergate was more than just a coverup, it also lead directly to the Oval Office as the source of the whole conspiracy, not merely just the coverup of the break-in. Any "exoneration" of Nixon comes from the fact that investigators could find no direct evidence that tied Nixon to the actual DNC break-in scheme. The whole matter of 18 minutes of erased tape has long been since as the smoke that lead to the fire that was Nixon's direct involvement in the entire scheme. We can never know for sure, but I can't imagine any reasonable person can draw any other conclusion than that Nixon and his senior advisers were all in on the break-in.
I don't see any evidence of these people being sociopaths. Being narcissistic isn't in and of itself a definition of a sociopath.
I'd rather put it that certain classes of problems require quick solutions, even where an optimal solution cannot be worked out. So yes, I agree that some situations demand immediate decisions, and then you try to figure out how to make that solution work in the medium term. By the same token, the "decision paralysis" overanalysis is certainly a grave risk where a crisis is approaching. Firemen are a classic example of where you have a few rather basic rules, along with an understanding of the physical properties of fire, and you use them to make rapid decisions, some of which may be suboptimal, or ultimately outright wrong. However, when coming up with fire codes, one does have some luxury of time to come up with reasonable rules that prevent deaths, and maybe even prevent firemen from having to make dangerous snap decisions to begin with.
When it comes to government, as I say elsewhere, you're usually dealing a vast society unto itself, with its own inherent momentum and rules, and changing that system requires a very good understanding of motivations, systems of control and accountability, so when you get some populist who declares "I'm going to throw it all out and make it better", you're not dealing with someone who is taking a calculated risk, as a general or a firefighter might, you're dealing with someone who is simply replacing competency and knowledge with hyperbolic chest thumping.
A general may have to make snap decisions, but if they're not decisions based on knowledge of tactics, in other words they're not just random commands made simply so there are commands going down the chain of command, then that general is likely to doom his army. Even snap decisions have to come with some ability.
Absolutely. One only has to look at the US Constitution, which was largely written by large land holders with fundamentally agrarian interests. While the Industrial Revolution was taking off in Britain, and there were nascent industries in the American Colonies, by and large they were still fundamentally agrarian societies. That tension between industrial and agrarian lifestyles was just beginning when the Constitution was put together, and reached the boiling point in the Civil War. Non-mechanized agriculture requires a large labor pool, and very often an indentured one. Slavery was the very emblem of pre-industrial agriculture, and it's destruction was the hallmark of the victory of industrial society over agrarian society. The more swiftly industrializing North could far more easily dispense with the need of indentured workers (though not entirely, despite the mythologizing of the Union), whereas the still almost classical agrarian Southern society was still addicted to the drug of cheap, indentured labor.
I don't see any correlation between sociopathy and exploratory urges or public debate. Sociopaths don't tend to worry about long-term consequences at all, which is how they usually get found out. Sure, they come in with their magnetic personality and certainly convince people that they have the qualities of a good leader, but their fundamentally anti-social nature and general disregard for other people, not to mention their poor impulse control, usually out them soon enough. They can, of course, cause a great deal of damage in the meantime. I don't think being a sociopath is a requirement of being a contrarian, and indeed, while I find contrarians do usually have pretty inflated egos, the ones I've met (admittedly anecdotal) still seem to abide by basic social norms and usually seem fairly sincere (in other words, there's none of that narcissistic self-aggrandizing). And I see absolutely no connection between sociopathy and wanderlust.
I have heard the argument that certain occupations may give those on the more narcissistic end of the spectrum; for instance neurosurgeons, where an ability to disregard the supreme risks of screwing around with someone's brain is actually of an advantage. I'm not sure I entirely buy that, but if it is the case, then it's only a pretty small number of occupations where being an out and out sociopath or psychopath is actually a good thing.
That fact has been observed for centuries now in the English-speaking world as centralized authority gained more and more power. By the same token, when you talk about the President, Congress and the supreme Court, you're also talking about the top layer of governance. Even the Cabinet is a sort of senior management. Governments themselves are actually astonishingly difficult to reform, and politicians who come in with fevered barnstorming declarations of how they're going to "drain the swamp" or whatever grand promises they make, swiftly discover that the vast overarching edifice of government has its own peculiar momentum, and that while change is possible, it is enormously hard, and requires a great deal of hard work, compromise, and acceptance that evolution is usually better than revolution.
I think we're seeing the education of a President in real time right now. While most previous presidents have been members of the political class, and whether at the state or Federal level have some understanding of the mechanics of government. Trump is a true outsider, with little in the way of pertinent previous experience, and so his first few months have been a pretty harsh education in the powers of the Presidency, and just as importantly in its limitations. How successful he ends up being is greatly dependent upon HIS ability to alter the way his own behavior. I see some evidence of a shift in the White House, as the would-be revolutionaries like Bannon are eclipsed and their influence wanes.
Are you saying that observed psychological phenomena don't have evolutionary roots? Evolutionary psychology isn't exactly a "left field" discipline, and a lot of time is spent studying other species to try to determine the roots of human behaviors.
As to "values", there is very little consistency in time and space, even where religious affiliation has remained constant. Five hundred years ago virtually every Christian society permitted some sort of indentured worker, and even two or three hundred years ago, slavery was practiced by plenty of God-fearing Christians. Women were basically chattel until the beginning of the 20th century in most Christian jurisdictions, and many Christian societies were overtly racist.
Five hundred years ago being seen as a heretic in Italy meant you had a high risk of ending up being burned alive, and nowadays the Catholic Church officially decries capital punishment, not just for "thought crimes" but even for murderers.
Certainly there is some commonality between different civilizations in the nature of moral codes, simply because most societies have been confronted with similar problems and a limited number of solutions. But the underlying rule of social animals, whether they be the great apes or other species, is that there be rules. The rules themselves have been highly variable in time and place, and codes of conduct we would find abhorrent were common place in ancient times, even among the Judeo-Christian peoples, to the point that even by the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, early Christians created a sort of "escape" clause to get them out from under the more prohibitionary Hebrew legal rules by declaring Jesus had "completed" the Old Law, and had this nice new law, though Christians have spent the last two thousand years debating which of the Mosaic Laws still apply and which don't.
And this sort of cultural and moral evolution has taken place in every society, simply because, like it or not, morals evolve over time, and religious and secular authorities need to maintain the relevance of a society's set of beliefs by constantly retconning the rules of conduct.
There's no doubt that the evolution of H. sapiens certainly came with significant behavioral changes, but even our species, for much of its time, has spent it in small groups. Large societies, and in particular complex dense urban societies, are a very recent innovation, and the evolution of governing such societies has been one of either trying to map instinctual dominance hierarchies on to these large populations, or try to find ways to circumvent them.
I'm having a hard time imagining the last US president who could be considered "humble". I think Truman probably was, to some extent (or at least he was a reasonably miserable fellow, a sort of an American version of Clement Attlee), as was Hoover. Washington is portrayed as humble, but I can't imagine a military commander of his ability actually being humble; generals are just not known for their humility, but generals who are bred in war have to be both charismatic and able.
The problem with democracy is that any would-be political leader has to have those hubristic "alpha" qualities that people, often wrongly, associate with great leaders. The advantage of democracy is that you can get rid of them, although a really bad political leader still will usually have at least one term to screw things up.
This is how I read it as well. A lot of neurological and psychological machinery evolved in a considerably different habitat than most humans now live. We're wired to be hunter-gatherers; small and generally fairly mobile groups where leaders were far closer to those that they lead. If you look at other primates, and in particular our closest relatives the Great Apes, you can see how a combination of physical strength and bravado are usually what make for an alpha male; basically the tribal leader. But in those relatively small groups, challenges to the leadership are relatively frequent, so that a shit leader isn't going to last very long at all.
Civilization has rewritten the rules, in no small part because what's good for a tribal hunter-gatherer society like our ancestors or like chimpanzees, just doesn't scale up at all. But our every instinct, written over millions of years of hunter-gatherer society, remains attracted to charisma (and physical appearance as well). We really are still just hairless apes; big brains, but a lot of social instinct that gets in the way, and it's going to take a lot longer than the mere 10,000 years or so that we've been developing urban civilization to evolve a different psychological toolkit.
I see the moron anti-AGW mod points are out in force.
All that counts is an objection was made. For the denier, it is irrelevant if the objection is sensible, rational, or even has anything to do with the topic at hand. So long as they raise their hand and making some vaguely intelligible sound, apparently a whole field of scientific inquiry comes crashing down.
What happens when fuck up the planet so much that it fucks us up? Do you think some H. sapiens is magically immune to climate change and pollution?
The problem with the "small increase in temperature" line is that it doesn't take into account the actual sheer amount of energy required to raise mean surface and lower atmospheric temperatures even a fraction of degree. Climate pseudo-skeptics and the idiots that follow them don't acknowledge, because it kills their entire line of reasoning, that upping global mean temperature even a quarter of a degree means the atmosphere is trapping vastly greater amounts of solar radiation.
And of course, for ocean-life there's a double-whammy, in that not only are ocean temperatures increased, but the oceans begin to absorb more CO2, altering pH levels. In the short term, the oceans can act, both due to their capacity to absorb heat and CO2, to mitigate rising temperatures, but it's only short term, and the costs to marine ecosystems is huge.
At any rate, even the deniers are beginning to end the denialist game. Now it's all about "Oh sure, the Earth is warming, but what can we do, and what about those funny little brown people, why does Al Gore hate them so much?" They've entered the whole "eat drink and be merry for tomorrow will shall die stage", simply because they want to eke a few more years or decades of profits out of fossil fuels before the game is up.
It doesn't, so what's your point? Wakefield's "research" was a willful fraud to try to promote his own vaccine formulation.
And then you're going to be confronted with Java code, which is everywhere. The fact is that Java is in a helluva lot of places, and I can't imagine anyone disadvantaging themselves by continuing to develop in it. Frankly, other than as an interesting aside, what's the point of learning Scala?
The secret to producing a dog is to encourage continued juvenile behaviors; neoteny. A wolf is actually a pretty useless pet, while they are a social animal, they are high strung and unreliable. However, as likely happened the other times wolves have been domesticated, those wolves who are a little less high strung, who can form even a marginally stronger social bond with humans, will be tolerated, whereas the wilder members will either be killed or driven off. And really, it actually only takes a few generations for a canid to essentially be domesticated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now obviously this experiment is to intentionally domesticate a canid, but the fact remains that encouraging neoteny doesn't actually seem that hard, and so long as a wolf could prove to be of some use, and is tolerated, there's at least a chance of domestication. And so far as I understand the molecular data, it suggests this has happened multiple times. As well, there is still gene flow between wild canids and domesticated dogs to suggest that the process might even be shorter these days.
Most ACs are trolls. I really do think it's time Slashdot disallowed AC posts.
Those fart apps don't write themselves!