The nature or nurture debate may be over for liberals: scientists have isolated what they believe to be the “liberal gene.” Yes, that’s right. Researchers believe that DRD4 affects people’s ideology. It is ironic that Republicans who oppose evolution may have an evolutionary reason for their position. Of course, this is assuming that people are evolving toward the liberal gene like the fully opposable thumb.
You now know why you feel that need to pledge to NPR, attend Earth Day events, and watch Countdown and Rachel Maddow. It is not your fault. It is in your genes.
The scientists isolated DRD4 on the double-helix of a DNA strand to reach their conclusions. It was not hard to find it was the gene: it was wearing Birkenstocks, a hemp-made shirt, and trying to “really understand” what the other genes were experiencing.
What is clear from President Obama’s positions on torture, privacy, and gay rights is that it is also clearly a recessive gene for some.
Lead researcher James H. Fowler, a professor of both medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego says “[t]he way openness is measured, it’s really about receptivity to different lifestyles, for example, or different norms or customs. . . . We hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences [a measure of openness] will tend to be more liberal.”
While some may challenge that as a bit of a stretch, my concern is ideologically designed babies. Of course, since opposition to stem cell research and biogenetics is part of the belief structure for some conservatives, they are the least likely to ask for DRD4 to be removed from embryos. However, what of those pesky biogenetic loving libs? Could Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi be working at this very time on an army of test-tube liberal babies? Learn the answer on the next Glenn Beck Show.
Source: NBC
Jonathan Turley
Tony C
Why do you insist on restating (essentially agreeing with) everything I say as though it is an argument against my original statement. I don’t think you are a troll but you exhibit some trollish behaviour.
Here’s one definition of a troll.
http://amasci.com/weird/flamer.html
Tony,
And how does one restore credibility and accountability? By removing the power from monied special interest by removing private financing altogether and making pols once again answerable to all their constituents interests, not just those who coughed up the most cash.
As to saying you’re a troll? Read better. There was another option there. It is rather curious that all your solutions either have a certain “two steps forward one step back” quality to them. That is a propaganda technique useful to undermine actual progress by creating an illusion of progress but it can also be simply due to either not thinking out or not caring about collateral damage, the true impact of money or the right of free speech and equal protection as they relate to the right to petition or maximizing efficiency in repairing social systems.
Like I said, there are other options than you being a troll and disagreeing with me has nothing to do with it.
There are many kinds of trolls. Example(s): bdaman – not a true troll (although he’s said he’s paid before but his posting history says otherwise) in presentation but rather someone poisoned by consuming too much propaganda: a regurgitator. The various incarnations of Wayne/Gerty – the fanatically disturbed and plain ol’ disturbed. The Breitbart crew – pure Neocon operatives paid to disrupt by any means they can. The Juvies – Teens without supervision. The Jim Byrne – stealth trolls who start off offering reasonable sounding statements but twist and degenerate into trollery. That leaves another type left which I’ve seen elsewhere but never here – The Sophist Sophisticate Obfuscator; a troll who offers solutions that appear reasonable on the surface but upon examination have either high associated costs and/or negative consequences that play to corporatist interests – a subtle distractor.
So far with your half-solutions, you haven’t ruled yourself out as the last type, Tony. That being said, they come in two flavors – the paid distraction/obfuscator and the simply wrong. But there are other things about your posts that tell me you are more likely in the second category. Your near misses at viable solutions analogous to a blind man describing an elephant without knowledge of elephantine anatomy. I’ve said all along that what I find interesting is that others have perceived you as a troll. Personally I think you just don’t think through consequences well enough examining a system you have at best a layman’s acquaintance with. Not with malice per se (which would make you a troll) but rather from not understanding the interplay and interconnectedness of ancillary systems and their attendant issues.
Restricting corporate personality is only a part of the solution and will be simple (and inadequate) mitigation without CFR being instigated in conjunction.
@Buddha: Then we disagree; the essence of corruption is not campaign finance, it is unconstrained and unaccountable politicians that can lie, cheat and steal without consequence.
There you go again; saying that if I disagree with you I must be a troll.
I am all in favor of net neutrality. I am in favor of a strong and independent FEC. I am in favor or strong and enforced constraints; sociopaths pay attention to enforced rules, and the stronger they are enforced the greater the risk and the fewer they will break.
If you want to control corporations, remove their personhood and thus their freedom of speech, and THAT stops the effect of “money is speech”.
Corporations aren’t people, they don’t deserve the rights of people, and they don’t VOTE. The vast majority of the time a corporation trying to influence an election is almost by definition making a selfish attempt to corrupt the political process to work against the interests of citizens.
(Sorry, something is wrong with my keyboard, if I type fast it loses letters…)
@Buckeye: I’d like you to critically examine your own statement for its implications.
pecifically, if a politician is “graft rone,” why are they in office? I assume to take graft, or bribes, or for self-enrichment in one form or another. To me that would mean the ads they run in campaigns are just to get into office so they can take graft. Why would they care who pays for their ads? All they care about is getting power so they can take bribes; and the bribes always start after they get into office. The ad payments are just an appetizer before the real personal enrichment starts.
Sociopathic politicians do not feel they “owe” anybody anything ever. They can screw an elderly couple out of their life savings and leave them homeless without remorse. These are the people that will stop unemployment benefits and destroy lives for their own political interest. That want to make it easier for banks to illegaly foreclose on people’s homes, and insurance companies to deny coverage that can save lives.
They don’t OWE anybody anything, everything is a transaction, PERIOD. The rich donors understand it the same way: Their donations are an investment, a gamble that pays off by getting a graft-prone politician into office. THAT is their payoff. Once the corrupt politician is in office, then they can buy that vote, and get that politicans to introduce legislation that favors them, and so on, just by paying him.
Politicians are speaking the truth when they say they do not feel beholden to their donors. They don’t. From the politician’s point of view; those guys got him elected because he can be bought, which serves their purpose, and he doesn’t owe them any favors for doing what served their purpose. It is true he can be bought, but now they have to do the buying. With CFR, he (or she) won’t feel any differently. However he gets there his vote is for sale to the highest bidder.
CFR is just a sideshow, not the main event.
Tony,
“What WILL stop the graft and corruption is better laws that prevent politicians from benefitting from it financially, both while in office and after they leave office. I don’t see campaign finance reform as capable of doing that.”
CFR by itself is simply one step, but a crucial one. If you don’t see taking the primary method of political financial lubrication off the table as impacting corruption, then seriously man, you’re either a troll or blind.
You say money is the problem yet want to hold on to this love for using it as a political tool by allowing it to remain in play by individuals based on an distinction without difference as pointed out above. Jefferson might have agreed with you in principle but then again he hadn’t lived here for the last 20 years to see exactly what kind of damage unrestricted money can do to the system. Had he, given the rest of his works, I think he’d have been appalled by the post-Buckley damage done to both free speech and equal protection as to take the exact opposite position you advocate. He’d be for publicly funded elections because without the money blurring issues you can best see all the available ideas on the table to assist you in choosing the best one because if anything, Jefferson was all about “the better idea”. If money causes corruption, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
As to worrying about “FOX being the only voice”? If that’s your concern, you should be more focused on Net Neutrality, because without it? There will be no voice at all for anyone but the corporate and the super rich. Our rights are under attack from multiple vectors and any solution will be a multiplexed solution, but CFR must be the spine of that solution. Money is the mechanism of corruption. What I have said in no way weakens free speech, but addresses a core systemic mechanism that can be altered to both protect the rights of citizens and curb corruption at the same time. You don’t eliminate corruption by half measures anymore than a doctor would only try to cure an illness in half of your body and not expect it to flourish again. You can do it incrementally, sure, but the goal is a complete cure. That can’t be done without addressing CFR.
Tony C.
You make good points, but it is the money in campaigns that allows the most graft-prone candidates to be elected. The more they accept in advertising, the more they owe to their puppet masters. It seems to me to be a vicious cycle.
Buddha
You may have been correct the first time.
From the Urban Dicionary:
gargage
1. A typo. 2. The amount something is gargled. (also garglage)
Oops. I tried to type garbage, but I instead typed gargage.
Not garbage or gargage but an excellent exposition, by the way.
@Buddha: Laws are about issues, and communications are about issues. If people are not allowed to spend their money talking about the various social issues (homosexuality, drug use, alcoholism and drunk driving, etc) then the people that control our mass communications will set the agenda instead.
I don’t want Fox News being the only voice out there talking about their invented “homosexual agenda,” or the “socialist liberal agenda.” Sitcoms, comedians, talk show hosts on TV and radio, reporters and news programs and magazines all talk all day about the social hot buttons, and it costs money to air them or print them or host them on a website, and it is people that decide whether that money will be spent and on whom.
I don’t want the guise of “entertainment” (used by Beck, Limbaugh, etc) to be the only way we are allowed to engage in political speech that can reach the entire country.
I don’t have the law school background to interpret the constitution like an attorney, but I have read a fair amount of Jefferson’s writing and I doubt Jefferson would have objected to a man spending his own fortune to print pamphlets by the thousands and pay men to hand them out all over the country. I imagine he would consider that a man’s right to do with his own money as he saw fit.
They may not have anticipated the extent to which wealth would be expended in the pursuit of influence; but I doubt they would restrict that in any way.
As you correctly point out, the probem is graft and corruption. Were they here now, that is the problem to which they would address themselves, but I doubt their solution would include restrictions on speech, or money spent on speech.
With exceptions for slander, incitement and lies, I believe what the founding fathers would see as political speech (like ad campaigns) is harmless. It is opinion. It is the exchange of information and ideas. Sometimes profoundly stupid ideas, but ideas nonetheless, and other minds can accept or reject those profoundly stupid ideas. Those ideas are not responsible for graft and corruption, and stopping them will not stop the graft and corruption.
What WILL stop the graft and corruption is better laws that prevent politicians from benefitting from it financially, both while in office and after they leave office. I don’t see campaign finance reform as capable of doing that.
SB garbage
I’m not sure what a gargage is although I suspect it has something to with ladies underwear from the 1800’s.
Tony,
See, we are never going to agree on this in this because the root evil that led to Citizen’s United rests squarely in another SCOTUS decision that is unconstitutional gargage, namely Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (the case that says money is protected free speech). It’s a case full of tortured reasoning to justify political greed in the guise of protecting a right and it’s manifest nonsense and has been since the day it was decreed. Citizen’s may be the taproot of corporatist graft, but its seed is found in Buckley‘s attack on the integrity of not just free speech but equal protection as well.
Free speech is free speech – free and equal to all – and it is precisely by adding money into the equation that you lessen the equality of the right proper. As too the distinction between pure political organizations and corporations, I’ll stipulate that in theory you are correct about groups of individuals acting solely for political reasons as being fundamentally different and closer to operating in accord with the intent of the Drafters, but in today’s reality it’s a distinction without difference due to the negative impacts easing money restrictions in general has created. Graft is the problem, but you cannot remove the mechanism for the legal fiction without removing it from the system in toto. That would be known as a “half-assed job”. 503(c)’s are now more often than not simple puppets of either corporations or super wealthy individuals operating from corporatist or personal profit motives. You have to remove private funding period to fix the systemic problem with elections. “Private funding” is a euphemism for “pay to play”. If you donate enough graft they’ll even let YOU write the law! Woo hoo!
Horseshit. The money is the problem. It is the fulcrum of corruption. To break that leverage, you must remove the fulcrum. Do this and re-equalize the right of free speech and you have something that is even more in line with the ideal of a government for the people by the people.
The right to petition should be a standardized form that persons, groups and even corporations can fill out addressing their issue and requested legislative solutions that those in Congress have a deadline for publicly answering or rejecting with cause. Advertising, issue statements and debate time can indeed be mandated to broadcasters for the privilege of being allowed to do business here and if those couple of hundred program hours every two years is too much for them, they can feel free to peddle their wares elsewhere. No money should have to change hands ever to be elected to office. You should just be able to get enough signatures to be on the ballot, meet any other formal filing requirements and win the vote on the merits of your positions.
@Buddha: I don’t think publicly funded elections will accomplish the goal, because I believe in free speech and think it would be unconstitutional to limit an individual person’s free speech, and unconstitutional to prohibit citizens from getting together and advocating (with money) for a candidate independently. I think Move On both is and *should be* constitutionally protected free speech.
There are just too many ways to circumvent the system, and without changing our fundamental rights of self-expression and self-funded expression (which I do not want to do) I see no way of getting around it.
How would we deal with the self-funded billionaires like Romney and Bloomberg and others? Restrict their rights to promote themselves with their own money?
How would we stop what is currently legal commerce, like selling a rubber chicken dinner for $10,000 a plate? How would we stop the Koch brothers from hiring their own crew and producing and airing their own commercial for their desired candidate?
Money is like water, it follows the easiest route. Put a halt to campaign contributions from corporations and their money will move to the next weak spot and leak through there. Like direct advocacy.
I am in the camp that (despite Citizen’s United) corporations are not people and should NOT have the right of free political speech; I think it should be a crime for any corporation to make any attempt to influence politics in any way.
If *people* want to pool their money for leverage and do that kind of thing they should be able to do that, I just think they should not be allowed to form a corporation for that purpose. A partnership, or co-op, or club, or something else, but not an immortal corporation with limited liability.
@Buddha: Wow, something was definitely lost in translation!
I have no desire for eugenics or preventing sociopaths from breeding. I am talking specifically about an evolutionary breeding advantage that sociopaths have; I am describing the function of a system without making any proposal whatsoever about what to do about it.
I am doing that because I think a lot of people make the mistake of believing that other people think just like they do. As an attorney I think you are trained in the opposite (more realistic) approach; but many people do. So I am just trying to give laymen an inkling of how sociopaths *think*, so they have a model to reference when they *do* think about corrective measures. They need to understand that sociopathic amorality and an absence of empathy pays, and pays very well.
That said, the rest of your post is correct. Law is the way to deal with it; what people think is their own business, it is what they DO to others that may become society’s business.
As far as politics (and business) is concerned, I think transparency and uniformly enforced regulation are the vaccines against the parasites. They infest our government and corporations because nothing stops them, and I think we need a system such that we do not HAVE to just trust them to do their job.
Although I can analyze complex interacting systems, you (Buddha) are far better trained for this purpose than I: It is the field of contract law, and the goal is enforceable negative consequences for failing to meet promises (in politics) or duties (in business), along with the prevention of exploitation by people given the power to decide.
I have signed many a contract that gave me no choice but to actually keep my promises and actually work for my money. I don’t think that is impossible. I am sure it IS impossible to keep sociopathy out *completely*, but I don’t think it is impossible to increase the risks for sociopaths, force them to change their risk/reward calculations, and thereby mediate the negative effects of having them in society.
But again, I will work my best against any law or system that restrains people for what they *might* do; which is why I also rail against the Bush/Obama systems of “preventive detention.”
Again.
With.
The coffee.
*sigh*
Correction:
“Our system is breaking because it wasn’t designed to deal with bad actors.”
SB
“Our system isn’t breaking because it wasn’t designed to deal with bad actors.”
Coffee mishap. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Tony,
Keeping sociopaths from breeding is a solution that won’t fix the problem. Thoughts are not crimes, but actions can be and not all actions are created equal. Even if you prevented sociopaths from breeding, you’d still have random mutation to deal with. The parasite within the somes of clementia (body of humanity) cannot be eliminated completely without enacting something analogous to Heydrich’s Final Solution.
To cure the organism (the body politic) by “killing” the parasite (sociopaths) before they can act would be a deathblow to an already weakened and mauled Constitution. It would be eugenics run amok again.
Focusing on eliminating sociopaths from society is a waste of time.
Keeping their amoral input from damaging the social fabric by creating legal systems and safeguards to limit or prevent bad actors within our political and legal systems isn’t.
Our system is breaking because it wasn’t designed to deal with bad actors.
Our system is breaking down because sociopaths in office and the plain old greedy myopic evil by choice people have beenallowed to not only break same said system, but protected and encouraged by other sociopaths and narcissists within the system who won’t do their job and punish the criminals within the system for fear of damaging their own personal position (another reflection of the “screw everyone else, I got mine” mindset). Example: Obama not only refusing to prosecute Bush and Cheney for their blatant crimes, but then further exacerbating the problem by claiming he as President has the right to execute citizens without due process. One lying sack of crap not doing his sworn job to protect the Constitution and the others simply wiping their asses with Constitution with Imperial Impunity.
The bottom line is you cannot eliminate the problem by attempting to change human nature without becoming monsters in the process, but you can mitigate damages and possibly recoup by creating legal control systems that are both self-correcting and incapable of political manipulation.
Sociopaths are like herpes or malaria: you can treat them (and the social controls under which they operate) to limit damage and/or spread but you’ll never be rid of the infection unless/until evolutionary processes themselves operate to remove sociopathy from the range of human behavior.
The problem is the graft culture of campaign finance and spreading corporatist influence concerned only with personal profits social justice be damned have created a viral creche for sociopaths and narcissists willing to do their profits uber alles agenda for cash that enables their own criminal deficiencies as human beings and failures to act to their Constitutional mandate over their personal agenda(s). This is another reflection of the wrongheadedness inherent in expanding corporate personality: they are not real people but rather a legal fiction all to capable of being exploited by sociopaths because corporations have no internal controls beyond what 1) the controllers want or 2) the government imposes when forced by We the People.
You don’t fix that problem by eliminating sociopaths.
You fix that problem by eliminating the ability of those who enable them for their own narrow and usually greedy self-interests.
The way you eliminate that publicly funded elections with no organizational contributions (from either corporations or PAC’s) and limiting lobbyists to presenting issue papers for proposals to Congress, not letting them write the laws that will govern their industry.
We won’t be able to mitigate the damage by sociopaths to our systems until we cut off their parasitic food: money.
Anybody that opposed evolution because they oppose “bad science” does not understand either science or evolution.
Nobody can claim Darwin’s evolutionary thesis, the ENTIRE THING, is bad science without indicting virtually all of science ever done. Darwin’s work is quintessential science. People that oppose evolution do not believe in ANY science, period. They reason backward from a fantasy they wish were true, to a thoroughly ludicrous set of premises, and because they would cry if they had to give up their dear fantasy, they insist these ridiculous premises are “true.”
Tootie
There used to be some Republicans that believed in evolution. Just as there used to be some liberals that didn’t. They’ve all gone into hiding until things settle down.
It is inaccurate to say that all Republicans oppose evolution. Most Republicans I know oppose evolution because they oppose bad science. There are even some Republicans who believe in evolution.
Maybe liberals look different. A woman that I have never met before told me I looked liked a liberal democrat. She was one too.