"Never Compete. Every competition damages your reputation.
Our rivals seize occasion to obscure us so as to outshine us. Few wage honorable war. Rivalry discloses faults that courtesy would hide. Many have lived in good repute while they had no rivals. The heat of conflict revives and gives new life to dead scandals, digging up long-buried skeletons. Competition begins with belittling, and seeks aid anywhere it can, not only where it should. And when the weapons of abuse do not effect their purpose, as often or mostly happens, our opponents seek revenge and use them at least for beating away the dust of oblivion from anything that is our discredit. People of goodwill are always at peace, and those of good reputation and dignity are of goodwill. " - Balthasar Gracian, "The Art of Worldly Wisdom"

Who here feels edified by having our fine citizens, both Democratic and Republican, dig lower and lower into their beings to beat the other team (being addicted to sport) in this lifelong attempt to finally reach bottom?

Competition is not the only avalable option...

(More below the fold)

There has been a diary named "I Guess I'm not Pro-Choice: Sextuplets" on the rec list for some time now that, due to other tasks and commitments, I put off reading until early this morning.  I actually haven't finished it because I followed this link to get context before reading further.  There I found that not only was there the article referred to in the diary, there was a note written to visitors from DailyKos.  Please explore the original article and the other DKos diary, and then join me below the fold...

Interesting exchange on another diary, in a discussion of sharing.I wrote this:

A subtle and powerful point...observe:
On the morning of 9/11, a friend called us immediately after the first plane crashed, and said "Turn on the TV!"

We immediately did, just in time to see the second plane crash into the Towers. I turned to my wife and said:

"I guess now we'll have to share."

A true story. True then, true now.

In a world where the poor can see our riches through advertising, we will share or die.

Although this site is generally dedicated to promoting the Democratic Party, common sense tells us that support for Democrats cannot be unconditional.  It will almost be universally agreed upon that defectors, such as Joe Lieberman, need to be punished, because if they are not punished, they will continue to drain resources from the commons without contributing themselves.  Or worse.

'Evening Folks.

I have a few personal thoughts to share.

We are here to get Democrats elected to public office. That is the only way to start the healing process and minimize the scarring resulting from the wounds inflicted by the NeoCons and their enablers. On that point we can agree. I hope. We cannot create change until we are in a position to make changes happen. That should be our mantra.

But we seem to get distracted quite easily, to the delight of the very NeoCons we hope to defeat.

We like to fight/snipe/get snippy among ourselves. While this might be satisfying, it does give ammo to the enemy. There is no sense in getting nasty. We agree on far more issues than not. We should concentrate on those points. We should lean on the candidates to define themselves to us. Not let our squabbles define us to the NeoCons. And allow the NeoCons to define us to the greater public.

We can be very "one-issue" to the detriment of the larger picture. Everybody is entitled to their priorties. Of that there is no question. Then again, we can allow more Republicans to get elected because our nominee did not come out strongly on our pet issue. We lose sight of the goal.

Danger Below The Fold.

Wednesday, May 16
7 pm
Regent Theatre, dance studio
Arlington MA

An evening with refreshments, a talk on gleaning by Oakes Plimpton, and the Agnes Varda documentary The Gleaners and I (2000, France) to celebrate a new non-profit forming:  Boston Area Farm Gleaning Project
Tickets are $10
BAFGP membership is $10 contribution

Oakes Plimpton is the coordinator of the Boston Area Farming Gleaning Project [BAFGP] and has been present at the creation of farmers' markets, community gardens, community land trusts, and CSAs. He's one of the little known heroes of local agriculture.  

Now he's re-establishing the practice of gleaning.  

Thanks, Oakes, for all your work.

 Allow me, for a moment to put on a referee uniform, college football uni will be fine, I don’t like the new NFL uni’s, too metro for me, to offer some words of advise and guidance to both the radical left and the newly elected Democratic Majority in Congress…

Don’t Shit Where You Eat…both of you.

Ernst Fehr of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics conducted a game. The game was called "The Public Goods Game." It went like this: teams were formed, with each team having 4 individuals. Each individual got $10 house money. The game had 10 rounds of play. In each and every round each individual could anonymously contribute any part, $0-$10, to a kitty for a proposed "group project." At the conclusion of each and every round the house doubled the total contributions to the kitty of each group and then divided that sum equally among the 4 players in their respective groups.

What Fehr and his colleagues found was that individuals generally contributed $5 in the first round. This was a safe bet, halfway between full cooperation and full defection. As the game progressed through the 9 remaining rounds, cooperation among the 4 members on each team disintegrated until no one threw any money into the kitty. Why did cooperation dwindle?

Many Germans and other Europeans believe that the United States will ask their allies to contribute more to Iraq and Afghanistan, as I have explained in German Reactions to the US Midterm Elections.

Europeans find it harder to say "No!" to the new Congress controlled by the Democrats than to the Bush administration.

This is the final post on some useful aspects of game theory in trying to promote cooperation and achieve positive goals in public and private life..

Here are the first, second, third, and fourth.

This is the fourth post in a series of five about practical lessons from game theory as discussed by Robert Axelrod in  The Evolution of Cooperation.

(Short version: there are lots in politics, organizing, international relations and everyday life.)

This is the third post in a series of five about how cooperation can develop in world motivated largely by self-interest. The applications from game theory can be very useful in getting things done in all kinds of settings.

Here are the first and second posts.

If this is your first visit, please check the earlier entries. The first introduced the topic and the second explained the Prisoner's Dilemma, a scenario often used to study situations where two parties can chose to cooperate or defect.

This is the second post in a series about how one aspect of game theory can shed very practical light on many kinds of human  interactions. Here's the first.

The series is inspired by the insights of Robert Axelrod's  The Evolution of Cooperation.

El Cabrero has recently become addicted to the HBO series "Deadwood," which, among other things is about how cooperation can develop in a basically lawless situation.

This is also the subject of one of the best and most practical social science books I've ever read: The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, which came out in 1984.

Axelrod's study of one aspect of game theory has enormous practical applications in international relations, war and peace, domestic politics, community organizing, and many other aspects of public and private life.

In this series of five diaries, I've been critiquing George Lakoff's Nurturant Parent metaphor for the liberal worldview and using recent insights from evolutionary psychology to try to create a stronger foundation for understanding the differences between the liberal and conservative worldviews and a more appealing framework for telling the liberal story.

In Part One, I argued that the Strict Father model doesn't go deep enough and that the conservative worldview is actually based on behaviors that are typical of primate societies, namely alpha-male behavior. Part Two concluded with a question: If evolution rewards the pursuit of self-interest, does the Strict Father model fit better with evolutionary theory than the Nurturant Parent model does? Part Three showed that natural selection can lead to cooperation as well as competition. Part Four proposed that competition and cooperation might make more sense as underlying conservative and liberal values, respectively, than strength and nurturance.

Join me on the flip for the big finish (Part Five).

In a Recent posting I went on a rant about the obscenity of Survivor's newest "offering"... and I use the term euphemistically.  A lot of people thought the title was offensive.  I agree. It was as offensive as the show.  Here's my point: I think we need to stop using pretty words for ugly things.  That only gets us in trouble.  What happens when you sugar coat torture; the dismantling of the constitution; war crimes; abandoning Americans? You get "extraordinary renditions", "unitary executives", "pre-emptive war", and New Orleans.  If one don't get ya, the other one will.

As things heat up in anticipation of WWIII, survival is going to be more than a plot for some Reality TV show.  We need to give some serious thought to what that means... in Reality.  So kill the TV and follow me on an amazing voyage of discovery and survival....  

Americans are completely brainwashed (thanks to Bush/Chaney/Rumsfeld, neocons, and mainstream media) that we are locked in a total and permanent state of war with terror, and with Islamic extremists.  We as a nation have been so overwhelmed by the paranoid Republican narrative of history and current events that most of us can't even imagine an alternative interpretation.  But that doesn't mean that there isn't an equally plausible alternative explanation.  Bush and the neoconservatives, in the U.S. and Israel, and some hapless leaders who were willingly duped by Bush (most notably Tony Blair), have actually provoked the current state of war.  You may ask what about 9/11?  Could Bush and the neocons have provoked that?  Well, the answer is, quite possibly, yes.  But even if they didn't, their behavior since then has definitely provoked anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment around much

Here's the Top Ten Good News Stories of the Week, published every Sunday

1) A Responsibility To Make Peace, A Letter From King Abdullah
My father, the late King Hussein, often said peace is a gift that we give to future generations. And this was Jordan's vision for the region when our country took the tough decision to make peace with Israel in 1994. (more)

2) After TV Series, Pakistan Rethinks Barbaric Rape Laws Fantastic news for women in Muslim nations! Check out this amazing development... Thanks to a recent television program's influence on the culture: