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utopyr passes along a personal observation about differences between siblings that reminds me that I have long felt that the best argument for the existence of the souls is the sheer number of people who have nothing in common with either of their parents, and whose siblings sometimes do and sometimes don't share this peculiar trait.
Of course, it is an even better argument for the rightness of the myth of the changeling.
And on balance, it is firm confirmation of the late Gerald Durrell's observation that given maximal reinforcing stimuli under carefully delimited experimental conditions, an animal will do pretty much anything it feels like doing.
This is unrelated to my further reflection on how ill-adapted so many people are to the choices available to them at the moment; all those modernist fascists or Communists who chose, and often got passionate about, options that didn't quite fit their personal perceptions of the world, but who chose when life handed them an either-or from which there was no possible deviation.
Rather like the present condition of national elections in countries with which I have a personal familiarity....
Speaking of which, it is interesting to note that Barack Obama's opponents have figured out not only how to use the simple rhetorical techniques by which Obama fired up his original supporters (the difference between the two being that the ideas behind his rhetoric were not pulled out of thin air but out of the collective experience of the early twenty-first century) but also how to push Obama's most automatized buttons: his tendency to ameliorate situations of intense dissent by striking a posture somewhere in between the two camps, for example. "I think you're dead wrong, but I'll incorporate some of your suggestions if it'll get the process moved along a little" is not a slogan that fits on a campaign poster, but Obama is almost instinctively inclined to imagine conditions under which he might adopt a posture slightly different from the one he has hitherto adopted. Flexibility is a virtue that is hard to translate for an audience that confuses invariant courses of action with principles.
The report on the neurology of legerdemain summarized in today's New York Times is of particular interest with regard to all of the above (and the research involved has been reported elsewhere recently, just not in such illuminating detail). As one of the commentators remarked, techniques for the systematic misleading of consciousness have been exploited by stage magicians since ancient Egypt, but for some reason nobody has ever bothered hitherto to figure out why the techniques work beyond the not very exact terminology "distracting the audience's attention."
Of course, it is an even better argument for the rightness of the myth of the changeling.
And on balance, it is firm confirmation of the late Gerald Durrell's observation that given maximal reinforcing stimuli under carefully delimited experimental conditions, an animal will do pretty much anything it feels like doing.
This is unrelated to my further reflection on how ill-adapted so many people are to the choices available to them at the moment; all those modernist fascists or Communists who chose, and often got passionate about, options that didn't quite fit their personal perceptions of the world, but who chose when life handed them an either-or from which there was no possible deviation.
Rather like the present condition of national elections in countries with which I have a personal familiarity....
Speaking of which, it is interesting to note that Barack Obama's opponents have figured out not only how to use the simple rhetorical techniques by which Obama fired up his original supporters (the difference between the two being that the ideas behind his rhetoric were not pulled out of thin air but out of the collective experience of the early twenty-first century) but also how to push Obama's most automatized buttons: his tendency to ameliorate situations of intense dissent by striking a posture somewhere in between the two camps, for example. "I think you're dead wrong, but I'll incorporate some of your suggestions if it'll get the process moved along a little" is not a slogan that fits on a campaign poster, but Obama is almost instinctively inclined to imagine conditions under which he might adopt a posture slightly different from the one he has hitherto adopted. Flexibility is a virtue that is hard to translate for an audience that confuses invariant courses of action with principles.
The report on the neurology of legerdemain summarized in today's New York Times is of particular interest with regard to all of the above (and the research involved has been reported elsewhere recently, just not in such illuminating detail). As one of the commentators remarked, techniques for the systematic misleading of consciousness have been exploited by stage magicians since ancient Egypt, but for some reason nobody has ever bothered hitherto to figure out why the techniques work beyond the not very exact terminology "distracting the audience's attention."
