charles brough

Yes. I agree but why have we been so fearful? Every year some 65,000 Americans die because they got into their car, but the public has been terrorized by the death of a mere 3,000 in New York. Why do many more veterans kill themselves than have been killed by the enemy? Why are seemingly normal men going berserk and setting out to kill as many people as possible? This is not the America of WWI and WWII. It would seem that the level of stress has risen. That may explain why such problems now plague us.

I had a normal male directional sense up until I began feeling my age. I could orient a town according to the points on a compass and always knew about where I was. In later years, however, One part of town seems completely wrong to the compass and to me even if that part is only a few blocks from where I live. There is one intersection where for years I know I have to turn right to get home but it always seems to me that home is to the left. The directional sense can be corrupted by age . . .

It would seem that we all agree that corruption is more serious than it would seem from the Index, but not as bad that you have to pay bribes to get a drivers-license, tip your kid's teacher or pay to get at the head of the line. However, I wonder of you can imagine what it would be like if we had a hyper-inflation and the government imposed wage and price controls on everthing . . .(!)

Yes the public is afraid, but ZAPATOS is correct in that we don't feel it. It is not the same as we would feel when opening a gate that says "Beware of Dog." It is more like the "fear of being sued" if you don't get liability insurance. The fear the people in the West, and especially the US, feel is measured in how far we have to go to feel safe. Yes, we do not fear flying, but we sure would if all our airports security system was dropped by a long labor strike. That is why we are justified in calling what the US public feels as "fear." But why do we go to extreme and self-destruction measures to protect ourselves? There is more than fear involved. The fear is just one expression of the immense stress being felt by the public. This growing stress-burden is the hidden cause of the breakdown of health and, hence, the immense cost of medical care in the US. It also explains why people become addicted to anything that lets them escape from it for a while---such as narcotics, gambling, pornography, individuals collecting "stuff" until they have no room to walk around in their own house. It has a lot to do with amount of crime and the size of our prison population, and why far more of our veterans kill themselves than are killed by the enemy. Why all the stress? It would take a book to really explain that---which is what I've tried to do in my webpage. . .

I have long noticed that when I drive, I have a sense of what is parallel to the other ways to get to my objective. I base when I turn on that sense. However, I also note that my wife instead uses landmarks to know when to turn. I have also seen that this characteristic has been researched and documented. One explanation is that since we evolved through millions of years of evolution in hunting-gathering groups, the men, as hunters, for some reason depended upon this directional sense more than did the women doing the gathering. It is also of note that when a man gets old, he can lose that directional sense completely. When he does, he is ashamed to admit it and resist having to ask for direction from someone. He is left without an important tool as he lacks the amazing ability of the women to use landmarks for directions. It is not necessary for us to view migrating animals with quite such wonderment. We have it also . . .

You raise a good point. But if we see the "good guy" only as our friend and the "bad guy" as our opponent, it can hardly be science. This being a science forum, I felt free to try presenting a more objective picture of the world---not just the usual subjective one framed by our secular beliefs, the one in which we are necessarily the "good guys." If we do believe that science is for the whole world, not just for the West, social theory needs to be objective---even if unpopulr with us. I think that the deteriorating world conditions are cause for enough concern to justify searching now for a realistic explanation of what is going on. You really don't need youtube to prove that. Who in his right mind thinks they have even 1/50th of our military power? But what everyone overlooks is that that is not the way now to judge who is the victor. The way I see it, they are winning because their puny little efforts have struck such fear, even terror, in our whole civilization that it is the major media focus and the overwhelming reason why we are spending trillions of dollars of our declining wealth in our effort to contain them. It is slowly destroying us from within.

Yes, we have not sunk to that level! Is that next? We the people could be led to it by the way big business and government lead the way. Once this becomes the way the whole economy functions, it is extremely hard to change, to root out. This slid into ever more corruption was not at all apparent a half century ago. There seems to be a trend underway and the outlook is disturbing. What is causing it?

Why go so far as that? There certainly exist groups of dedicated Muslims willing to die to kill Westerners, and all the groups feel a common bond of admiration for the al Qaida success in 9/11. I propose that the reason we both do, anyway, minimize it is that we both recognize that the effect it has is ius is all out of proportion to its ability to harm us. In other words, it has succeeded in instilling in the West and expecially the Us a sense of terror, of great fear. What are the chance of any of us being killed by another attack after 9/11? Nil, of course. Had we been calm, then ended the immense coverage of the whole thing, gone on to other things and shown ourselves to be fearless and not alarmed by them, we would have saved ourselves trillions of dollars of our national wealth. But we had no confidence in our government to handle it. We filled up with fear and demanded a response that showed how powerful we thought we were. And that fear remains and erodes our already weakening society. Our system is too weak for us to feel brave. We think our home or where we work might be destroyed next and our lives ended. In the end, it is really possible that this flimsy little Muslim suicide bomb terrorist network could actually be the catalist that would finally bring down our whole civilization. (I discuss all this, also, in my webpage . . . )

I agree with what you say about Sentorum---also that Iran is not a terrorist state (its Shiite, not Sunni). Moreover, Ahmadinejad never said they would destroy Israel. That was only a brutal translation of the intent to enforce "the right of return" which would enable the millions of Palestinian refugess from Israel to return and thus out vote the Judaic "theocracy" and install a "democracy." I've given up trying to define "democracy" other than being the most glorified ideal of our secular ideological system. Myself, I would define the Iranian political system as a theocratic republic. What we have is a Constitutional-Congressional system. What seems hard to get across is that "democracy," "equality," "humanism," "tolerance" etc. are ideals (doctrines). They comprise a secular ideology which provides the framework within which we think. It is natural to resist such a realization because all believers of ideological systems are determined to see theirs as "the Truth." However, if we don't begin to escape from that ideological confinement, we can never really understand what is going on in the world and what danger faces our whole civilization. (This is a subject I like and have written three books on it . . .)

How do we comare with other nations in corruption? According the highly controversial Corruption Index, we are 7-8 in a 1-10 scale with 10 being the least corrupt. It seems to me that we in the US deceive the system by making corruption legal. In many countries, you bribe to get what you want, but here it is called "campaign contributions," "lobbying," and "deceptive advertising." The corporate world and its lawyer-lobbyists legislate loop-whole laden laws so immorality can become legal.

Examples of what I meant are: . . . Gender dimorphism is applied to animals and in anthropology to hominids but rather well avoided in reference to humans in the rest of the social sciences. Most primates are described as polygamous or polygynous, but sociologists, historians, and social theorists prefer to avoid doing that and to infer we are a monogamous species. They want to avoid involving the role of monogamous religions in creating monogamous societies. That we are a territorial animal is avoided in all the social sciences. Also, that we evolved through millions of years as small-group primates is avoided because it would open the way to recognizing the role of ideological systems in binding us into larger groups. Social scientists use the word "altruism" for the effort to achieve group status inherent in the male competition for dominance. They also like to avoid the word "instinct" and prefer "genes," "hormones" and even (imagine it!) "hard wired." (And of course we know our instincts are conditioned or modified by "society." That is not an intelligent excuse.) Also, when you watch the TV news and all the politicians are on giving speeches it has not been referred to in the social sciences as "seeking cues from the dominant male." Believe me, I could go on, but that surely provides enough to illustrate my point. I am sure that, since I am not a presitigous degree bearing academic professional, there is plenty of quibble points that can be made with some of it but . . not most of it.

Yes, "doomed to fail" is a prediction based upon how one interprets past and present events and not foregone. A likey goal of the Muslim Sunni militancy (al Qaeda) is the decline and fall of our civilization. That could happen . . .

Oh, I know women do not "present" as do other primates, but psychology researchers have discovered that women in estrus are more attraced to more "sexy" men and are more apt to wear red (which also is more stimulating to men). Also, men do not go through "rut," but to women they "have inflated egos" and compete for "success" (wealth) and hence status. Young women seek out men with status. After that, what human social behavior is not equally instinctive to other primates? Are we really monogamous creatures? Could it be that we love to watch sports teams only because they represent the male hunting team or war party to a species that evolved as hunter/gatherers through millions of years of evolution?

The "Arab Spring" indicates that Muslims are seeking democracy, according to an editorial this month in the Wall Street Journal. The claim is also made that our wealth of intelligence and the drone attacks all insure that the militant's dream of destroying the West is doomed to fail. But is that really what the "Arab Spring" is doing---or is it that Islam has been overthrowing secular regimes and replacing them with regimes that are either corrupt, weak or both? Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Egypt were all secular. The Islamic, non secular regimes in the Near East are Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, and what we have waged war against for ten years in Afghanistan (with questionable results). We've spent over a trillion dollars on our wars with Islam, and we could easily end up with another one with Iran. Perhaps the al Qaida network expects us to spend ourselves to ruin. . . . Brough

Yes, it is understood in inconsistent ways, a truly sloppily defined term. Yet it is used in the social "sciences" and social theory. Actually, social theorists are motivated to keep it so poorly defined because you cannot define it accurately, without offending the faithful. I define it as "old world-view belief systems" in the glossary to my book because all of humanity does and has had world-view belief systems because they are essential to us so we can achieve enough unity of thought to feel a sense of community and be able to cooperate to solve common problems. Even our secular beliefs, "Secular Humanism," is an ideology. It is just that world-view systems grow too old in time as human thought improves. The old ones have had to be replaced now and again in the long course of human events. Our problems now stem from the fact that neither the Marxist nor our secular ideological systems are advanced, accurate, effective enough to do it. We need something better. . .