We loved twitter friend Dan Collins of POWIP AKA vermontaigne's disagreement with tahDeetz's assertion [above] re Leftists. "I disagree with the 'sane' thing." Exactly. As we twittered back, "To say 'keep sane' implies they ever WERE sane." But speaking of driving leftists over the edge, tahDeetz was spot on with this: Metaphorically WaterBoard your "favorite" Leftist. Make them read this.
"Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism," twittered tahDeetz this afternoon. We'd sent her a link to one of our uber posts from way back in February of 2005, "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open." Take THAT, you leftists claiming to own Darwin even as your core collectivist beliefs fly in the face of the economic logic of nature and human nature that underlies Darwin's theory of natural selection. A few excerpts from our original post:
February 2005 caption: A "snail link" — an article from the NYT Science Times that caught our politico-philosopho-scientific eye ten years ago. Not having the option of URL linking in those pioneering days, this protoblogger clipped the thing, underlined important passages, sent xeroxed copies to our small circle of interested parties and then carefully filed it away in a drawer, from which we were able to pull it this afternoon after all these years.
From our February 2005 post "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open":
"Meanwhile, the fossil record showed crabs, fish and others who would dine on these shelled delicacies diversifying and becoming better at cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open," goes the snail link from February 7, 1995, referred to in our last post. For ten years this brilliant/crackpot explanation has been festering in our brain. We're talking here about what went wrong with the Democrats, not to mention their leftist allies in academia, the MSM and the larger world of international progressivists.
… leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready. Enter the bloggers, stage right. As paleontologist Dr. Vermeij might say, "It isn't going to be pretty." Googling the good doctor, we were thrilled to see his field studies of animal evolution had led him to very much the same place Thomas Sowell has come to in his studies of economics.
It took a little longer than we'd thought it would for what turned out to be the Tea Party movement of constitutional conservatism to emerge and start reigniting the lights of the Shining City, but our words back then are standing up pretty well given the reverberations of the Revolution of 2010.
Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.
Interesting, though for those of us who study the natural world and have nuanced views of matters the world is a lot more complicated than a simplistic and rigid "competitive or not competitive" dichotomy. The left and right are both fraught with cases of simplistic misinterpretation of science to support their self-serving agendas.
Posted by: Sometimes you really need to think | April 03, 2011 at 06:19 PM
Uh, oh. "Nuanced views". You've given yourself away as a person of the left. :)
I am a lifelong amateur naturalist with quite a bit of academic biology, botany and natural systems studies along the way.
It's true that some spin narratives based upon junk science. AGW comes to mind.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting!
Posted by: Sissy Willis | April 03, 2011 at 06:50 PM
My worry is that too many people take what the MSM has to say as the truth and don't think things through to the conclusions that their reason would show to be the truth.
Posted by: goomp | April 03, 2011 at 07:59 PM
Oh, the left is just as bad. Multiculturalists, especially, ignore human nature, including, as your post suggests, the competitive urge. A lot of biology and genetic studies simply don't get done because they would tweak politically correct and mulitcultural norms.I am just not a fan of using organic biological cases and then applying them to social constructs like "economy".
But one can interpret organismal behavior to support anything. Ant behavior can be used to support collectivism OR royalism, for instance! :-) There are plenty of behaviors in humans that human-hating leftists will claim only exists in humans (slavery, for instance, which, coincidentally, occurs in some interspecific ant interactions) that do in fact occur in animals, depending, of course, upon how you construct those arguments.
I have a biology degree myself and remain an amateur herpetologist. I'd like to learn more about plants.
Posted by: Sometimes you really need to think | April 03, 2011 at 08:14 PM