Some percentage of political discourse consists of social signaling. People use the same catch phrases as others ("social justice," "close the borders") to express their ideas not because they're too lazy to think for themselves, but because it signals to others that they're part of a particular tribe (to use Assistant Village Idiot's terminology). Consequently, most of the rest of political discourse consists of people reacting to the identification of their correspondents' tribes with tribal signals of their own. Kinsell inadvertently used the symbol of an anti-military tribe while trying to select original words to describe his idea, and that's what he got called on the carpet for. It's like the day I accidentally missed putting my belt through the center back belt loop and got mistaken for a member of a gang at school.

My progenitors came to America, not too long after the 1880's, to get away from the kind of totalitarian hell-holes that are produced by policies advocated by the very same people who tell me the time when my progenitors came was a horrible, oppressive period in American history. If you manage to go back in time, you tell my great-grandparents that they came to the world's most oppressive country, and see what they have to say about it. Me, I'm going to respect their judgement and honor their memories by being free, the way they wanted their descendants to be.

Can't it be both? I mean, if somebody offered you an ice cream sandwich that would make you lose weight, wouldn't you take it without sitting there debating whether it was more important to you to lose weight or to taste delicious ice cream between two cookies? President Obama gets offered a solution that expands government AND (supposedly) fixes the recession; why would he hesitate to take it?

Indeed, Judge Crater, they're not unique to African-Americans; my Filipino mother-in-law talks about "Jewish lawyers" all the time. It may just be a coincidence, but she is also a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. I can't attest to Shakespeare's political leanings. Still, that doesn't rule out the possibility that a majority of African-Americans may hold the same views as my mother-in-law.

A wonderful article, Mr. Futurist! I would be interested to hear your views on the interaction between the denormalization of male behavior and the increase in ADHD and autism diagnoses (particularly Asperger's Syndrome diagnoses), and the trends appertaining thereto. Autism diagnoses are on the rise, though not entirely due to increased diagnostic detection of the milder Asperger's Syndrome. At the same time our schools' definition of what constitutes a "normal" child is shrinking and their flexibility to accommodate a normal but unusual child is calcifying, so that parents must seek a diagnosis in order to get their child any kind of accommodation at school, even ones as simple as allowing the child to sit on a special cushion or leave the classroom if he becomes enraged.

@whiskey: You wrote "Muslims are inherently violent because Polygamy creates a whole class of George Sodini or Cho Seung-Hui or Dylan Klebolds or Tim McVeighs." This is precisely the kind of ignorant statement that allows the multi-culti types to justify caricaturing people like me, who support statistics-based profiling, as ignorant bigots. Putting aside the fact that none of the murderers you mention are products of polygamist marriages or cultures, if polygamy really does cause an inclination to terrorism, you have to wonder why modern-day polygamists in places like the YFZ ranch aren't major sources of terrorists, even only in proportion to their numbers. If you just look at numbers, you'd have a much more reasonable argument that polygamy causes child abuse than that polygamy causes terrorism.

I think it's productive. A lot of people I know who profess liberal views* do not come to them by reasoning from principles; they hear a politician say something that sounds good, and they don't think hard about the consequences. I find that if you can have a serious discussion with them, and encourage them to find their principles, you will be able to point out to them the common ground they have with conservatives. The most incorrigible leftists, with whom there can be no common ground, are those who do not believe there is any point at which government ought to stop; they believe only in power and getting themselves more of it. By putting down his principles, AJA is asserting that he has some; this furthers the dialogue by establishing that he's not one of the incorrigible types. * and also a lot of people I know who profess conservative views

It's certainly reasonable to assert that the optimal size of government, assuming there is one, is not a constant size, but changes as a function of time. However, it is entirely fallacious to assert that this implies that the optimal size of government increases over time (I believe you call this "progress"). Now, if it does happen that the optimal size of government is currently increasing, that in turn does not imply that it ought to increase exponentially as it has been in the last 70 or so years, nor does it imply that it will continue to increase forever, nor does it imply that it cannot increase past that optimal point.

Yeah, the FTC has us bloggers all lined up, pants down, and the paddle's out, and they're tapping the paddle on their hand... why on earth would we think they were wanting to spank us? Especially with the FTC saying they're not going to spank us!

If some or many of the determinants of success or failure in a modern economy have genetic determinants, those populations who contain less of those beneficial genes will be at an irreducible disadvantagein competing in an increasingly globalized economy. I wonder if this is related to the increased incidence of autism spectrum disorders-- only some of which can be accounted for by improved diagnosing. Asperger's Syndrome in particular is so common in people with interests in fields like engineering and computers that it's sometimes known as "Geek Syndrome".