:) ......

oh...


that was ahhhhhhhhawesome!

oh yeah, that guy who got me that gig as "crowd control" for that grateful dead show? he was a rebel flag wearing black guy.

so?

fun gig that was!

power is back!
so yeah, that guy i was talking about up there...could be he is one of them cosmic cowboys...saw him most recently a little while back...anyhow, i consider him one of the good guys.

It was on our news that you guys got hit bad by storms and lost power. I hope you guys were okay. Glad you got the power back and are okay...

It is inherent. It exists within us as a permanent inseparable element. Is it inherited via genetic code?



The argument is that humans differ from other dangerous animals in that they can reason and ponder their actions. The argument is that humans have evolved behavioral modules that help them rationalize their actions of planing and coordinating their interspecies mayhem. This includes mechanisms of justification (dehumanization), mechanisms of coping with the violence (the battle surrealism effect or the "it seems like a dream while it is happening" phenomenon) and mechanisms of denial.

One mechanism of denial is to say our boys are sent to "die to preserve our values (democracy, christianity, naziism...whatever the value is..it is worth dying for). We never say our boys are being sent to "kill to promote our values and eliminate some antithesis of our values as being promulgated by some raghead gook commie jap kraut bastard. We know what is going on but we can't admit it.

It is like building a Mosque near ground zero. We know deep inside that all those islamic heathens believe that 9/11 was an act of valor in the name of muhommad. At the same time a christian church complete with a giant cross and possibly a synagogue are not only acceptable but required. These are the symbols that the people, the victims of 9/11, made the ultimate sacrifice

Len argues that corporations and institutions and politics create this situation. I believe they take advantage of the situation when it is profitable. I came into this thread favoring a psychology and behavior of war that was learned and independent of our hardware (DNA). I am not so sure now. I guess thinking has not really resolved anything at all but it has given me something to think about.

I tend to agree with the Post-modernistic thinkers.......we, for the most part, create our own realities. There is no universal "truth" per say. How we see and interpret our world may be a complicated or a simple process. And furthermore, if I BELIEVE in what I believe in with all my mind, heart and soul, and that gives positive meaning to my life, whether or not it's "true" is extraneous and irrelevant.

Insensitive sensibility is a way to cope with emotional drivers. Otherwise, it is too easy to be led by the nose through the chute and into the killing fields.

I don't think we have a gene for war but I do know how much of a mammalian brain is there to process events emotionally rather than logically. Behaviorists are aware of this and that led to big changes in the marketing strategies for everything from Depends to Presidents. If the stimulus-response chaining is done well and often (amplitude and frequency), it is trivial to use media, social networks, local clubs etc to create and reward mass behaviors. The nitro in the gasoline is our herd instinct, an instinct that is easy to test for and demonstrate repeatedly.

Let me run a tinfoil hat paranoid center top thought past you. While the umbrage continues to rise in the US, the State Department sends the Imam to the Middle East. Legally it can’t be a fund raiser because of separation of church and state and to stop that, the Imam requires handlers. Yet fund raising will be mentioned. If the local Muslims in the Middle East fail to give him money, they offend Islam but raise his support in the US. If the US Muslims fail to give him support because of the Middle Eastern Imams, the wedge in the US against the Middle Easterners is larger but support for the American Muslims goes up. If the Middle Easterners give him money, the State Dept has violated the Constitution and there are questions about the role of this administration.

Worse, right under the B roll announcing Obama’s support/non-support (whatta guy) was the crawler announcing the State Dept is “very concerned” about religious persecution in Iran. Now the American Muslims are supporting the administration because he is a “good man” if not a Muslim, the left wing extreme supports him because he is “their guy”, and the right is mute because a) either the mosque is built and they’re ready to hit Iran with a can of whup ass or b) the mosque isn’t built and the left is marginalized.

Meanwhile, with bases in Iraq and the military ready to pull out of Afghanistan, we roll toward the next Presidential election with pressure building to hit Iran.

All they need is the offending event.

The game is long and sometimes we can be right and still wrong.

sounds like propagation for more of the same

A break from the scheduled interrogatories.

Two new videos I did this weekend. Y'all have a nice week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cJnqLlUeyQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuPG54x3oOs

Those vids are good. I bet you could do an album of music and it would sell...

It is not about a war gene as such. There is no single sequence of DNA that codes for a war peptide or protein. It is about behavioral modules and are they inherent. I guess first you have to decide if you believe in behavioral modules as a way to describe the basis of experimental psychology. If you do, then it is a question of how these modules are constructed. Obviously, the psychologies to accept and perpetuate war exist. The question is one of mechanics. The question is not one of excuses: politics, religion, who is right and who is wrong. The question is the mechanisms for formulating and promulgating these excuses and the ultimate acceptance of their outcome.

That book does have some nice quotes though. Here is one from Robert Bigelow from a book called The Dawn Warriors; Man's Evolution Towards Peace (1969):

"A hydrogen bomb is an example of mankind's enormous capacity for friendly cooperation. It's construction requires an intricate network of human teams, all working with single-minded devotion towards a common goal. Let us pause and savor the glow of self-congratulation we deserve for belonging to such an intelligent and social species. Without this high level of cooperation no hydrogen bomb could be built. Without an equally high potential for ferocity, no hydrogen bomb ever would be built. Perhaps our cooperation has something to do with our ferocity."

The crux of behaviorism is there are no modules, per se. There is no attempt to look or guess what is going on 'inside' the brain. There are observable behaviors and chains of stimuli and responses that then become stimuli that can be recorded, hypotheses made, schedules created, and then tested by observation.

It seems cold and it is. That is possibly one of the reasons it upsets people. That and the fact that it provably works.

In college, they originally taught behavioral psych straight out of BF Skinnner's text using behavioral methods. It was very rigid and very effective. Freshman students with freshman hormones hit the campus ready to 'shape'. After a few years they had to make it a sophomore class to ensure the right prerequisites in ethics were taught first.

Thanks Cheryl. That might be fun but I'm a dog and dogs don't do albums. We howl at the moon and lick our.... toes.

that quote was somethin' else wunnit?

Well, just because they worked together doesn't mean it was 'friendly' cooperation or that it was 'single-minded devotion'. Maybe some of them just wanted to pay the mortgage and had to work with people that they didn't necessarily like! That happens to almost everybody everyday. Unless you're unemployed. Lots of that going around these days.

Well if you're a dog you sure sound good.