Serendipity

[mqbush]

After posting yesterday re control versus cooperation:
1. I heard on a local news show that the US incarceration rate is one in 100, not 150; the number of inmates has jumped, and apparently children are not considered to be part of the jailable population.
2. I picked up a book by Frances Moore Lappe, GETTING A GRIP, and in leafing through it I saw:
a)"We spend enough on incarceration to buy a Harvard education for each of the two million," (now 2.3 million) "mostly poor, people locked up."
b)And, on the subject of hardwired empathy and cooperation, she wrote: "Babies cry at the sound of other babies crying,...but not at a recording of their own cries. And there's certainly no reason to think we humans might be less empathetic than Rhesus monkeys, who've been shown in an experiment to forego food (in some cases to starve themselves for up to twelve days) to protect another monkey from electric shock."
Why is it, then, if we are hardwired this way, that some people become monstrous? Lappe answers: "We know that ideas can trump instinct....Consider 'honor killings,' in which fathers become murderers of daughters." Consider the Spanish Inquisition. Consider the Fascism of Mussolini and Hitler and Bush. Consider the corporate destruction of communities. An idea, an ideology, becomes more important than people, sociopathic. And people with this personality disorder write books and op ed pieces saying that it's liberals who are disordered (Michael Savage, LIBERALISM IS A MENTAL DISEASE, for example). Misdirection again.

[Lasher]

1. Article about it in LBN yesterday

Here's a link:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3202381

[mqbush]

2. Thanks