Just give peace a chance, is all we are asking,
Bro. Bartleby

Ah, and what a brave new world it would be if we were actually good at evolutionary psychology.

Here’s an especially irritating example from a recent New York Review or Books…

an evolutionary psychology explanation of the chickenhawk phenomenon. The more other people get killed fighting, the more likely the chickenhawk offspring will increase their share of the reproductive resources.

Could be. But then, here’s Edward Luttwak in the LRB:

in the words of the military historian Martin van Creveld, ‘men love war and women love warriors.’ That he is right cannot be doubted because, with few exceptions, wars throughout history have been fought by volunteers, … and men would certainly have found other diversions if warriors had not been especially attractive to women. There is also a corollary: when women love warriors, they procreate sufficiently to replace the losses of war – and that too cannot be doubted, for otherwise we would not be here.

There is indeed an evolutionary pyshology story about everything—but I’m not sure if “explain” is the right word for what they do.

“from where I sit it’s the post-Gingrich leadership of the Republican Party that’s primarily responsible for bringing the 60s-bombthrowing-radical style into the mainstream of US political discourse,”

How? As far as I know, the only groups that actively use the ‘bomb-throwing radical style’ are eco-activists and anti-globalizationists. You think the Republican Party brought them about?

Steve

Good heavens. You might want to look up the phrase “stifling dissent” and see how it is actually used.

Recent ‘victims’ include:

Janeane Garofalo
Michael Moore
Dixie Chicks
Susan Sarandon

Now I really think it would have been better if the ROTC members had said something. They should be willing to challenge the establishment rhetoric on campus. But it looks silly to turn their personal unwillingness into a cult of victimhood while apparently being unaware of the way “stifling my dissent” games actually get played.

As for #58, I don’t think “socio-biologist” is actually a word. Please revise your comment in such a way that it makes sense to people other than you.

It’s always a good idea to counter the arguments your opponents probably make, as opposed to the ones they actually do. Saves a lot of time.

This is what so much of the right is reduced to: crying that they’re being oppressed – these guys genuinely believed that their rights had been taken away – whenever they don’t find themselves in the majority.

John Mandle suffers from a severe case of ideological mon-opia in this case. He seems to be forgetting that political correctness and identity politics have cast a massive wet blanket on free speech both on campus and off.

So-called socio-biologists, who are Right-wing I suppose, have definitely got the short end of the stick in recent times.

Interestingly, the British proto-socio-biologists – such as Darwin, Galton and later Shaw – were mildly Left-wing. But far from being persecuted they wound up with peerages and lionised by everyone. Shows that the history of civil liberty in British-style states does not always fit into the Whiggish interpretation.

Practioners and followers of the London Differential School of Psychology (eg Jensen) and American socio-biology (EO Wilson,) have faced violent hostility and collegial persecution for their views. Charles Murray was in regular receipt of intimidation and death theats.

More recently two academics Andrew Fraser and Frank Ellis have been hounded out of their jobs for expressing “race realist” viewpoints. There is simply no parallel to this kind of persecution in modern academic life.

So far as I can tell the response from John Mandle, the supposedly freedom-loving academic at Crooked Timber, to these outrages has been a big fat yawn. Probably accompanied by a “they had it coming to them” muttered underneath his breath.