Clinton. You are still avoiding the issue as to why he survived. A failure of feminist groups to come to the aid of the many accusers. There silence was deafening.

The only reason the gop held the corner office for so long is because people remember how the Duke and the Dem legislature literally stole money right out of our paychecks to pay for all his social programs. Many youngsters dont remember the Duke so we will have to go through another money grab from the state capitol to pay for all of Davals programs. Hold on to your wallet.

So, is Brin wrong, or simply speculating outside the limits of your evolution-free credulity? (And keep in mind that even he calls it ‘mere conjecture’. A ‘thought experiment’, if you like.) Yes on both accounts.

After reading Brin’s thought experiment (and I said I thought he was serious until I read the disclaimer) the gobbledygook of inferences and conclusions from pseudoscientific speculation aside, I find it amusing that you could plause such a mechanistic explanation. I plause that the myriad manifestations of sexual attraction are not some mechanistic evolved survival strategy or innate qualities or chance genetics, but learned behavior, learned from observation, induction, deduction and inculcation. As you note: Foley has no one to blame but himself…Foley is a conscious American man, fully endowed with reason and choice. He chose to act in a way that society currently doesn’t condone, and likely believes that he was justified in his actions. We all have no one to blame but ourselves so it behooves us to act accordingly.

Fixing parking tickets is an indication of the mans dishonesty.

Why is fixing parking tickets dishonest? He honestly used his influence to get the parking tickets waived and why do you care? It’s a slight abuse of power but isn’t the use/abuse of power one of the perqs of elected office? People go into politics to get the power to further their vision of the future at best and to feather their nests at worst. He was reprimanded by his peers for his actions and that was the price he paid. I’d rather have a bright liar that votes my way than a dim bulb who is “honest” and votes against my wishes.

Yes Fox leans right. That puts them up against CBS,ABC, NBC…yada, yada There’s research available that indicates that the MSM is to the right of center (they have to be or they would get very little access), but who among us believes that news coverage is unbiased? It almost NEVER is neutral. Humans with a pulpit will tend to further their agenda in direct proportion to their emotional investment in a subject. Turns out that after being fed a sacrificial lamb (Libby) the blood lust was partially sated, but does that mean Bush, Rove & Co. are above fear mongering and dirty tricks (ostensibly for the good of their agenda and concomitantly OURS?) If one has a reputation for these types of public manipulation, then it’s not surprising if ill-will is engendered and emotionally vested people attempt to make life uncomfortable by poking at chinks in the armor. If there were no chinks, then the presidency would not be harmed, if anyone is harming the presidency it’s the current administration.

Honesty seems to have left the party when Truman retired. Truman was mainly remembered for taking responsibility, not his honesty. Total honesty is (thankfully) illusory and hardly laudable as it would cause more problems than it would solve. What constitutes “TRUTH” (except tautological or Boolean truth) is a matter of belief and opinion and is not black and white except in the mind of the believer. (Witness GWB)

The state is overwhelmingly DEM. The fact notwithstanding that Republicans have held the corner office for since Dukakis, maybe people are getting tired of the fear factor politics that is so prevalent in the conservative camp, perhaps not as I’ve stated before: FEAR is the most primal of human emotions and the most easily exploited. We’ll just have to see.

Fixing parking tickets is an indication of the mans dishonesty.

Yes Fox leans right. That puts them up against CBS,ABC, NBC, PBS, NPR, BBC,AP,NY Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, LA Times, MSNBC, CNN,Every late night host, throw in Maher, Stewart, Colbert, On and on I could go You get the drift. Not to mention a Washington press corps that voted overwhelmingly dem. You have one party that uses a cannon to push its agenda and the other party uses a cap gun. So much for unbiased coverage. Just look at the Plame affair. Month after month of coverage. Rove going to prison. Bush to be impeached on and on. Turns out the media knew all along Bush and Rove had nothing to do with this. But why not mislead the public for as long as possible. The media actively and with malice tried to harm the presidency.

Yes Patrick seems also to be dishonest. He was certainly caught lying.And no I wont be suprised if this doesn’t bother Dems. Honesty seems to have left the party when Truman retired.

I understand your point as to being pragmatic. Dont worry I’m sure Patrick will win. The state is overwhelmingly DEM.

The media have their biases as we all do, Fox news slants toward conservatives and others slant liberal. If in their zeal to drive someone from office, reporters libel or slander the person in question, they are liable to lawsuit and or prosecution.

However I dont make the law and it is not up to me to decide which laws to obey and not to obey.

It is up to you by choosing what laws you obey or not. I doubt that you consider all laws just and transgress those with which you disagree if you believe you will not suffer by those actions. I know I do. I obey no laws with which I disagree unless there is a metaphorical gun pointed at my head, and I transgress no laws with which I agree philosophically.

A standing congressman should also understand that. I’m sure he does.

Be that as it may. My problem with Frank, and I would have hoped dem voters would also have been upset was the fact that Frank had his boy friends traffic tickets fixed. Clearly an abuse of power.

Yes but it is small potatoes. I care about his positions on social issues and how he votes on issues that concern me.

If you think this is ok then I guess we just have different standards when it comes to our definition of honesty. I would not vote for someone who had fixed his girl friends or boy friends tickets.

No – honesty is honesty and all things being equal I prefer someone to be honest. Personal peccadilloes do not concern me overmuch as virtue is its own reward and if the petty non-violent “crimes” a politician commits comes back to haunt him then he has no one but himself to blame. (PC disclaimer: This applies to female politicians as well.)

I was concerned about Pres. Clinton’s shortcomings in that the fiasco damaged the image of the presidency and probably cost Al Gore’s election. I am concerned that GW’s shortcomings have damaged the image of America in the world as well. I was disturbed that Deval Patrick apparently lied about the fact that he funded DNA testing for a convicted rapist when it was totally unnecessary and then admitted it when confronted with hard evidence, but I will still vote for him. I vote pragmatically for the politician who I believe will represent my philosophy best. No politician supports my philosophy entirely but liberals generally come closer than conservatives.

Peace,

Jazzman

You also had Dem Rep Reynolds of Illinois who was convicted on 12 counts including sexual assault, solicitation of sex with a minor, and other assorted crimes. His case was barely covered. Almost nothing until after the conviction. Even then most of the coverage revolved around a sense of sadness as to how a man who has done so much good could fall from grace. He was later pardoned by Clinton,and then hired by Dem leader Jesse Jackson.

So you see it is much easier to fight these problems when you are not being badgered 24 hours a day from a media that has a vested intrest in seeing you driven from office.

Once again you let Frank off claiming prostitution should be legal, in which case you feel he did nothing warranting resignation I tend to agree with you on the prostitution issue. I believe it should be legal.However I dont make the law and it is not up to me to decide which laws to obey and not to obey. A standing congressman should also understand that. Be that as it may. My problem with Frank, and I would have hoped dem voters would also have been upset was the fact that Frank had his boy friends traffic tickets fixed. Clearly an abuse of power.

If you think this is ok then I guess we just have different standards when it comes to our definition of honesty. I would not vote for someone who had fixed his girl friends or boy friends tickets.

As to Clinton Yes he has balls, I never denied that. But you failed to answer my question as to the amazing hypocrisy of all the womens groups. If these groups had protested in mass as they should have, it would have been much tougher for Clinton to survive. His actions were much more serious than Foleys. Yet all the dems with the exception of a few supported Cinton. They now are on a 24 hour a day jihad along with the media to crucify Foley and by extension the GOP.

I agree 100% with your assesment of Foley. If he thought he was right or that his actions were not enough to warrant resignation he should have stood and fought. This is not the dems fault. I also cant blame tham for trying to make hay of this. We all know what sharks do when they smell blood in the water.

Old Nick I’ll try to answer tomorrow.

Studds should have been forced out much easier than in todays world of tolerance towards abnormal sexual behavior. He not only survived but was reelected. At the same time Studds was doing his thing a gop rep was caught in a relationship with a women. He resigned.

Yes – the people who re-elected him cared more about his political positions than his personal behavior. Whoever the GOP rep was, he could have chosen to fight and take his chances with the electorate – he had free will and wasn’t forced to resign. Either was Foley he could have done the same.

As to Frank, You seem to want to give him the benefit of the doubt. You really dont think he knew a prostitution ring was being run out of his home?

I stated that he might be disingenuous, I don’t know. I give him the benefit of the doubt in that being a savvy pol, he should have realized that knowingly allowing a prostitution ring to operate out of his home could have unpleasant ramifications. It may be that he benefited from a quid pro quo from his boyfriend by access to prostitutes allowed to use his home. I don’t know and I don’t care as I stated: Prostitution is a hypocritical crime and shouldn’t be one. What services adults provide for whatever exchange as long as it is mutually consensual is up to the parties concerned.

How do you explain Clintons survival? He had the chutzpah to fight his ouster and prevailed.

The fact is republicans when caught in these types of scandals usually resign Dems usually survive and in many cases thrive. Dems have more chutzpah than Repubs.

You say that liberals would not give a dem in Foleys situation a free pass. I said the Liberals on this site of which I am one , not liberals in general would take a dim view of Foleys behavior as well as his politics. As I stated in the first post, Republicans don’t hold a monopoly on protecting their own, liberals would obviously tend to protect someone with whom they agreed more strongly than someone with opposing views. That’s human nature. As it really is opinion in most situations regarding acceptable and unacceptable behavior then each individual makes the value judgment based on his/her beliefs. See my definition of Absolute Morality:

http://www.radioopensource.org/is-god-in-our-genes/#comment-8573#comment-8573

I’m not even sure if what he did constitutes a crime. Nor am I Studds admitted having sex with a minor. If he were charged of the crime of statutory rape he may have been found guilty. As no charges were pressed by the page or his parents, legally he is NOT guilty. That doesn’t mean that it was what I’d consider an ideal act but I have my own standards.

Live and let live. A laudable belief.

The reason I posted on this subject is to show some of the hypocrisy coming from the left. much on this sight as well as others…Just trying to provide some balance. Otherwise it would get boring.

I wouldn’t say that the left leaning bloggers on this site are hypocritical in general, but wide generalizations and unsubstantiated claims aren’t balanced in my opinion. Remember hypocrisy is the hand maiden of the ideal

Peace,

Jazzman

So. I’ve now reread the Brin pages. Page 1? Yuck. Lots of thinly veiled sociobiology: as if nonhuman species and human behavior are conflatable.

Page 2? Not so yucky. Brin’s two-way sexual selection speculation might not endure under the glare of truly scientific scrutiny, but at least he gave it the old college try. (And, despite what he seemed to think, he didn’t need any of that sociobiological nonsense on page 1 to introduce it, either.)

But this is exactly where you and I will break down, because, unlike you, I find evolution by natural and sexual selection the most plausible theoretical explanation for speciation I’ve yet encountered. (And you haven’t bothered to offer any plausible evidence to the contrary, now have you? “Consciousness Manifestation” is only a cool-sounding pairing of words so far. You haven’t yet backed it with any evidence.)

(Page 3? I only skimmed it. Sorry: no opinion available at this time!)

Anyway, it’s telling however that amid all the sociobiological precepts that he disavows and then nevertheless adapts to his thesis, his explanation for neoteny in humans is the only bit I recalled from my five-year-ago read-through (and why I posted the link to the essay – which only its link in the Wikipedia article reminded me of.) It’s telling because, despite the objectionable material he needlessly uses to set up his thesis, his thesis nevertheless fits, roughly, into an evolutionary ‘sexual-selection’ framework. (But, since I’m no expert, I’d like a truly scientific analysis of Brin’s thesis before I fully surrender my credulity to it.)

Brin was obviously reinterpreting the ‘scientific conventional wisdom’ washing through the journals and science books just before the writing of his article. That’s hardly egregious, and his thesis, even if seeming nearly ‘shocking’ isn’t any more pernicious or silly than most of the concurrent stuff he drew it from.

How I might modify Brin’s thesis: women likely acted as the prime selectors during most of hominid evolution (but since you don’t buy evolution, this is probably falling about as loudly as snow in your mind’s ears). Hominid women likely selected not ‘intelligent’ males as Brin supposes (because intelligence is a subjective, not objectively certifiable, trait), but the more artfully articulate males. Which is probably why human language is the single most revolutionary phenomenon to emerge in the mega-faunal biosphere since…oh, I don’t know, maybe since photosynthetic plants (the original photosynthesizers weren’t plants but strains of eukaryotic bacteria – which plants descended from, and which still exist in abundance—see Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House).

Intelligence and articulateness are tightly linked, but not synonymous. And brain science shows that, rather than being the products of ‘modules’, speech stems from neural activities all around the brain. Philip Liebermann argues powerfully in Eve Spoke that language, not the need to manipulate proto-technological materials in the Paleolithic, drove human brain evolution.

Remember now that I’m talking about sexual selection, not natural selection. Sexual selection means choice, not accumulated, random genetic drift. And I’m not big on the ‘selfish gene’ idea. Genes don’t breed, organisms do. Human genes don’t select mates—human beings do. (Moreover, Devendra Singh’s ‘discovery’ that ‘hourglass bodies’ attract all human males across all cultural boundaries has been challenged plenty, and plausibly. Men tend to find attractive the female forms they are raised around. But that’s a digression…)

So, is it implausible that the runaway-sexual-selection-for-neoteny Brin offers occurred evenly throughout hominid evolution? I dunno, but I suspect it was uneven.

However, it’s not a stretch to plause that substantial differences in sexual dimorphism over various eras of the six million years of hominid evolution correspond to different species-specific mating behaviors. I can therefore speculate—not hypothesize, but merely speculate—that a few hundred thousand years ago, when proto-homo sapiens sexual dimorphism was at its most negligible in recent hominid evolutionary history, male-to-male competition was largely absent:

(quote)

Monomorphic species of living primates (those taxa exhibiting low levels of sexual dimorphism) tend to express minimal male–male competition, whereas dimorphic species tend to express relatively high levels of competition…The findings of Reno et al. (2) and interpretations based on a range of evidence suggest that A. afarensis had a monogamous and not a polygynous mating system with strong intermale competition as was implied from previous reconstructions of great body size dimorphism. However the data are interpreted, their findings do not contradict what would be expected in a monogamous mating system. Indeed, the relatively low amount of dimorphism is more consistent with pair bonding (and the behaviors associated with it), more so than with the higher levels of dimorphism in single- and multimale extant primate genera.”

(unquote – see the link ‘hominid evolution’)

This ‘low dimorphism’ model elevates female selectivity to its zenith. In such eras, females would have been truly free to select the most artfully gregarious talkers, accelerating human brain evolution. Conversely, in the eras when sexual dimorphism was at its extremes, males might have selected for neoteny above other considerations.

So, is Brin wrong, or simply speculating outside the limits of your evolution-free credulity? (And keep in mind that even he calls it ‘mere conjecture’. A ‘thought experiment’, if you like.)

For me, he might be onto something, even if he hasn’t quite got it right yet (I think he doesn’t—I think his ‘female competition’ notions are extreme and questionable). Worse, at this point it’s really all just speculation, and might never be knowable:

“…how can we know in detail what small bands of hunter-gatherers did in Africa two million years ago? These ancestors left some tools and bones and paleoanthropologists can make some ingenious inferences from such evidence. But how can we possibly obtain the key information that would be required to show the validity of adaptive tales about an EEA (‘environment of evolutionary adaptation’): relations of kinship, social structures and sizes of groups, different activities of males and females, the roles of religion, symbolizing, storytelling and a hundred other central aspects of human life that cannot be traced in fossils?”

Stephen Jay Gould, More Things in Heaven and Earth, Alas Poor Darwin, Harmony Books, New York, 2000.

How this relates to Mark Foley: Brin’s thesis is that human neoteny is a sexually selected evolutionary trait. Neoteny in humans (it is not a purely human trait) can easily explain adult (especially but not exclusively male) sexual attraction to young people—even people judged “too young” by the prevailing social norms. If, in any given adult, this attraction overwhelms the adult’s enculturated sense of taboo, ephebophilia is likely, and pedophilia possible. (Keep in mind, however, that the definitions of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ are not universal but parochially cultural.)

However, this neoteny-driven taboo-breaking, to manifest without social opprobrium requires the enabling effects of rankism—or a culture like that of ancient Athens, which normalized adult-teenage sexual relationships. (Let’s not hold our collective breaths or hope for that last sort of development, shall we?)

Mark Foley found himself in a position of privilege and power that enabled actualization of his incipient ephebophilia. Even if we can point to evolution by sexual selection for possible indirect causes of his fall, his conscious choices and willingness to break taboo are the real culprits. Foley has no one to blame but himself. Not alcohol, not priests, not Democrats, and not ancient Athenians, either.

Foley is a conscious American man, fully endowed with reason and choice. He’s also a unambiguous hypocrite. (He’d make an interesting character for a Greek tragedy, though, wouldn’t he?)