“They are doing it to the whole country, they field tested it on veterans, and now it’s the whole country,” Pratt told a right wing radio show. “We are looking at a major assault on the right to keep and bear arms, it is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, where they used doctors as part of their torture routines and got people sent to the camps for improvement of their mental health.” If that’s true, improvement of mental health might not be the worst thing in the world for those on this list."
Fear of Race Realism and the Denial of Human Differences 1/3
INSERTED as he is the guy of the videos.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.
Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history. Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts.
Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate
"Moat studies on parenting are useless: don't control for inheritability"
.. and ah .. while saying he is not arguing against belief in religion he does say .. "I don't see anything so ennobling about a belief in a life to come, because it necessarily devalues life on earth .. oh yeah!
g'day hap, you got it .. that's the rational atheist's position .. and putting all energy into the only life you have sure makes more positive sense than spending time here in preparation for an experience which will never come .. to me the latter has always seemed an extraordinarily negative way of looking at our one and only - so to be absolutely cherished - life, on earth http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119024806