COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Little Cho was trouble. Most vermin is.


U.S. shooter troubled parents as kid

The liberal media are knashing their teeth about why a mentally disturbed individual is in normal society? That is the way they wanted it. Go back to the movie and times of " One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest." The left closed most of the "mental institutions" in this country and in the West in general. They wanted the disturbed to feel inclusive and mainstream. That is what spawned so many disturbed street people.

Talk to any family that has tried to get an adult drug addicted family member institutionalized. It is almost impossible. The surprise in all of this is that it does not happen more often.

The Left and liberal media and the Democrats took away from society the only practical way to protect society from those incapable of handling their own problems.

The Republicans are no better. They would never have funded the mental institutions if the Democrats would have approved them in the first place. Had they both agreed the ACLU and liberal courts would have never approved the legislation. Must not interfere with rights you know. Gotta go.



By BO-MI LIM, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 3 minutes ago

SEOUL, South Korea - The shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre had troubled his parents as a child because of speech difficulties, a newspaper reported Thursday.

Cho Seung-hui left South Korea with his family in 1992 to seek a better life in the United States, Cho‘s grandfather told the Dong-a Ilbo daily. Cho killed himself and 32 other students at Virginia Tech in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history.

"How could he have done such a thing if he had any sympathy for his parents, who went all the way to another country because they couldn‘t make ends meet and endured hardships," Cho‘s maternal grandfather, identified only by his last name Kim, was quoted as saying.

Kim said he had little communication with Cho‘s family after they left for the U.S.

"I don‘t even know my sister‘s phone number," the uncle said, adding he last talked to Cho‘s mother in October, the report said.

Meanwhile, South Koreans mourned the deaths of those killed in the Virginia Tech shootings at a special church service Thursday, some fighting back tears from the guilt that a fellow South Korean was responsible for the massacre.

"As a mother myself, my heart really aches as if it happened to my own children," said Bang Myung-lan, a 48-year-old housewife, holding back tears. "As a Korean, I am deeply sorry for the deceased."

The cardinal said everyone should work together to prevent a recurrence of "such an unfortunate event."

50 comments:

  1. At Lew Rockwell.com. Sad Days in Blacksburg:

    My mind keeps going back to the students in those engineering classrooms and the incredulousness mixed with fear that they must have felt. And anger, based on the idea that some incredible and unknown creep was in the process of cutting their lives short.

    Hey buddy (I’d think to myself), do you know how much I sacrificed to get into this engineering program? And my parents? I was up all night studying for a test! Please just go into the men’s room and shoot yourself now. I have too many plans for my life for this to happen.

    [...]

    (S)ome perspective is in order. A recent Surgeon General study found school-related homicides comprise less than one percent of all homicides involving students, and that the number of school homicides has been falling. Kids are safer on college campuses than they are at most other public venues. This reflects that bourgeois values still persist and the triumph of society’s institutions that promote them. The political class (and the political media) should refrain from using this event to bolster their agendas.

    It dishonors those hopeful students who woke up Monday morning but whose lives ended before noon. It is to them, and their grieving families, that my mind keeps returning. Rest in peace.

    ReplyDelete
  2. At the same time, I think of those parents of high school and college students who, year in and year out, approve of, and usually pay for, Spring Break in Panama City and similar venues, where crude licentiousness is the order of the day and concerns for personal safety do not rank particularly high.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mark Steyn:
    On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

    Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. ...
    Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

    We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection” is a delusion: when something goes awry — whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus — the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:

    When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances”, we make cowardice the default position.

    I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

    — Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.

    ReplyDelete
  4. New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine set a bad example for both his constituents and the rest of us, and he is now paying the penalty in a Camden hospital.
    As of Wednesday night, the governor was still in critical but stable condition, having already undergone several operations, with a thigh broken in two places, a broken breast bone, a broken collarbone, a broken vertebra in the lower back and 11 broken ribs. Doctors had recently inserted two catheters into his back to deliver pain medication more effectively. Even so, he remained heavily sedated and was relying on breathing and feeding tubes.

    New Jersey's chief executive was not wearing his seat belt, as the law requires, and news accounts indicate he regularly rode that way and bristled at aides' suggestions he buckle up.
    ...
    There was another issue here, too, along with the governor's disregard for his own laws - the increasing abuse of motorcades by officials entitled to have them.

    New Jersey regulations allow official motorcades to speed only in emergency situations. The governor was racing to attend a meeting between shock jock Don Imus and the Rutgers University women's basketball team, hardly an emergency.


    Laws are only meant for the "little people", those with the "power" being a tad more equal than those others without. Thusly they do not have to be concerned with compliance to the law.

    Whether seat belt, speed, or gun control is the issue.

    Little man Cho had it wrong, it's not wealth that corrupts, it's power. Pvt England and her SSgt lover can attest to that.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act."

    Oh, bullshit.

    First of all, animals have instincts - a pre-programmed course of behavior. Human beings don't.

    And while I fully appreciate and wholeheartedly endorse every young person's need to grasp the principles of active self defense ,
    I do not accept this massacre as an example of wholesale passivity on "our" part.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Arizona Sen. John McCain, has admitted that his wife not only illegally used drugs but walked away from criminal charges. The McCains have worked to make Cindy McCain's addiction into a political asset—despite the fact that she stole the drugs from a charity she directed and used them while mothering four young children.

    In 1994, Mrs. McCain admitted that she had solicited prescriptions for painkillers from physicians who worked for an international charity that she founded, the American Voluntary Medical Team. She then filled the prescriptions in the names of her staff.

    There are two ways to react to this behavior. According to the Betty Ford model, people can sympathetically respond to the oppressed and ignored wife of a busy politician who has bravely come forward to admit her overpowering addiction. Mrs. McCain took this posture when she first tearfully confessed her addiction. She and her husband repeated this performance in October on the NBC program "Dateline."

    The other possible public reaction is one of anger. Americans are prosecuted every day for such drug use. While most drug abusers purchase their drugs from street dealers, Mrs. McCain used her status as a charity director and senator's wife to cajole the drugs she wanted.
    ...
    She was the privileged wife of a prominent family and spouse of an important politician, a person who had her own position of prestige and power. Should she not be held at least as accountable for her actions as an uneducated inner-city drug user? After all, she could enter drug treatment at any time she chose, unlike many drug users who find themselves in prison.

    Moreover, Mrs. McCain was violating a position of trust by stealing from a charitable organization, using its money and medical expertise to fuel her drug use. Is this not morally more reprehensible than simply purchasing drugs illegally?

    Finally, Mrs. McCain was the mother of four children at the time she admits to using drugs—between 1989 and 1992. Her children were born in 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1991. In other words, Cindy McCain was using drugs while raising small children, one of whom she adopted while she was an addict. In most states, family services will remove children from a woman who is known to be an active drug addict, and she would certainly not be allowed to adopt a child while addicted.


    Different strokes for different folks, justice is not blind to power and influence. It is a "good thing", being a wife of a US Senator and the daughter of the local Anheuser-Busch distributor.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Fight or flight responses are pre-programed into the pysche.

    To deny that is to deny human nature.

    Most folk choose flight, absent that opportunity, passive acquiessence is the norm, for humans. Ask the Gypsies and Jews of Europe.
    Ask the people of Iraq.
    2.25 million of them have taken flight, rather than fight.

    ReplyDelete
  8. April 19th (Patriot's Day) is a significant date. It is coincidentally the anniversary of the battles at Lexington and Concord (the opening of America's war of secession from Britain, in 1775), the German assault on the Warsaw Ghetto (1943) , the FBI/ATF assault on the Branch Davidian church at Waco (1993), and the tragic misdirected Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing (1995).

    ReplyDelete
  9. Trish

    First of all, animals have instincts - a pre-programmed course of behavior. Human beings don't.

    Wholly incorrect.

    Fight or flight mean anything?

    ReplyDelete
  10. HUMAN INSTINCTUAL BEHAVIOR

    In the late 1800s, William James proposed that human behavior is determined largely by instinct, and that people have even more instinctual urges than less complex animals. James believed that certain biological instincts are shared with animals, while human social instincts like sympathy, love, and modesty also provide powerful behavioral forces.

    Sigmund Freud considered instincts to be basic building blocks of human behavior and play a central role in his drive theory, which postulates that human behavior is motivated by the desire to reduce the tension caused by unfulfilled instinctive urges or drives. For instance, people eat when they are hungry because unsatiated hunger causes tension, which is reduced by eating. For Freud, the life instinct (Eros) and its components motivate people to stay alive and reproduce. The death instinct (Thanatos) represents the negative forces of nature. Another theorist, William McDougall, described instincts simply as "inherited dispositions."

    ReplyDelete
  11. Multicultural boondoggle
    By Arnaud de Borchgrave

    Quicksand is the only common ground between Western values and militant Muslim fundamentalism.

    How many parallel societies can the US allow?

    Islamist extremists have found willing partners among leftist radicals who never got over the end of the Cold War -- and jump at any opportunity to rumble against whatever government is in power.

    Multicultural suicide

    ReplyDelete
  12. Heck, man is an animal and instinct plays a role in behavior.

    2164th,

    problems abound in locking up, errrr, institutionalizing folks without their committing any crime. Take our own creature Habu, he certainly has expressed a willingness to commit violence, on a HUGE scale as well. He, like CHO, thinks it is only directed at his enemies though, as if that were a legit excuse.

    Gun control - I've noticed how many from the 'right' maintain it is the 'left' that has jumped all over the VT massacre to use as a political club for gun control but it seems to me it is the 'right' who first leaped on the idea that the students weren't allowed to pack heat. There is also a strong inclination it seems to blame the victims. I'd like to see how 'they' square those comments with their 911 feelings.

    Abortion - life begins at conception, or earlier if you wish, and ends at death (oh my define when we are dead). Anyway, my point is that it is one long continuum and we make decisions to end life at various points along the way for a variety of reasons. We remove life supporting devices for the injured, aged, and otherwise dying. The choice of ending a life through removal of life support (i.e. the womb from the child, the respirator from the aged) best lies with the immediate family. They should be under no illusion though that a life is being taken.

    ReplyDelete
  13. "Fight or flight mean anything?"

    Instincts are universal among a given species. That individual humans must decide, in individual cirsumstances, between the two, demonstrates the absence of a universal, naturally predetermined course of action.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Trish,

    That individual humans must decide, in individual cirsumstances, between the two, demonstrates the absence of a universal, naturally predetermined course of action.

    Tell ya what Trish. Do a little research on your own and you'll find out how wrong you are.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Amazingly some people would argue that rigor mortis sets in after death.

    ReplyDelete
  16. does an amoeba get rigor mortis?

    ReplyDelete
  17. "Do a little research on your own and you'll find out how wrong you are."

    About what? About the fact that human beings, rather than being able to rely upon inborn instinct, must rely upon individual evaluation and rational calculation that does not pertain to other mammals, much less lower life forms?

    ReplyDelete
  18. This fellow 'died' in Death Valley, Ca. in a car accident.

    ' it seemed to be in a sequential nature, more or less, I say more or less because time itself seems to have disappeared during this period. But the first thing that I noticed was that I was dead and...I sort of had the perspective that I was dead in the same way that you see in television movies where the sheriff will say. "Yup, he's gone." (Could you see your body?) Oh, yes, quite clearly. I was floating in the air above the body...and viewing it down sort of a diagonal angle. This didn't seem to cause any consternation to me at all. I really was completely dead but that didn't cause emotional difficulties for me.

    Then, after that, I realized that I was able to float quite easily, even though I had no intention of doing that...Then I very quickly discovered also that no only was I floating and hence free from gravity but free also from any of the other constrictions that inhibit flight...I could also fly at a terrific rate of speed with a kind of freedom that one normally doesn't experience in normal flight, in airplanes, but perhaps experiences a little more in hang gliding and things like that...But I noticed that I could fly at a phenomenal rate of speed and it seemed to produce a feeling of great joy and sense of actually flying in this total fashion.
    ...Then I noticed that there was a dark area ahead of me and as I approached it, I thought that it was some sort of a tunnel and immediately, without further thought, I entered into it and then flew with an even greater sensation of the joy of flight...
    After what now I would imagine to be a relatively short period of time--although again time was dispensed with--I noticed a sort of circular light at a great distance which I assumed to be the end of the tunnel as I was roaring through it...and the light--the nearest thing I can barely approximate its despcription to is the settling of the sun at a time under ideal circumstances when one can look at this object without any of the usual problems that staring at the sun causes...
    The fact is, this seemed like an incredibly illuminating sort of a place, in every sense of that word, so that not only was it an awesome brightness...with a tremendous beauty, this kind of yellowish-orange color, but it also seemed a marvelous place to be. And so, this even increased the sense of joy I had about this flight. And then I went through the tunnel and seemed to be in a different state. I was in different surroundings where everthing seemed to be similarily illuminated by that same light and, uh, I saw other things in it, too..a number of people...I saw my father there, who had been dead for some twenty-five years...
    I also felt and saw of course that everyone was in a state off absolute compassion to everything else...it seemed, too, that love was the major axiom that everyone automatically followed. This produce a phenomenal feeling of emotion to me, again, in the free sense that the flight did earlier, because it made me feel that..there was nothing but love...it just seemed like the real thing, just to feel this ssense of total love in every direction.

    Later I did feel, because of my children and the woman I was married to then, the urge to return..but I don't recall the trip back.

    (Did it seem like a dream?) No, it seemed nothing like a dream...It really is a strange sensation to be in, but it does give you a feeling that you are in a kind off eternity.'

    From "Heading Toward Omega' Kenneth Ring

    The appearance of death is not the experience of death.

    Sort of shades of Plato.

    ReplyDelete
  19. You have it partially right, trish.

    People use "individual evaluation and rational calculation" to either overcome or reinforce their instinctual drives.

    What is considered a rational calculation to some, is a sure sign of insanity to others.

    Militarily, the Alamo or the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae & the Charge of the Light Brigade being three examples of a perception of possible institutional insanity, by some, at one end of the scale.

    The US forces in the Battle of Baatan and the subsequent Death March stand at the other.
    General Wainwright believing that he'd be Court Martialed for the surrender of Corregidor, after the War, instead of being promoted and honored.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Ash..
    amoeba's and jellyfish get wriggle mortis

    ReplyDelete
  21. That should have read:

    Amazingly, some people would argue that rigor mortis does not set in after death

    ReplyDelete
  22. The Virginia Tech victims had a choice in how to react. Some "played dead" and got shot. Others blocked the door to their class room with a table and lived. One veteran with combat experience was killer charging the killer to try and disarm him. Some were safe and some injured jumping out of windows to escape.

    ReplyDelete
  23. I agree with the shrink, bob.
    Even youtube exposure will come back to haunt society.

    The worse of the worst scenarios, airing that video.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Cho's Grandfather said he had speech problems in child hood. Those kept up in high school and for his whole life.

    Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say.

    Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.

    Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.

    "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,"' Davids said.


    Killer In High School

    ReplyDelete
  25. Here is part of one story where they did try to resist the killer. They heard him coming and tried to barricade the door. It failed for some reasons, partially because the killer was shooting through the door.

    Gunman's Bullets

    Goddard pulled out his cell phone, dialed 911 himself, and with the operator on the line, began trying to explain the situation and where he was calling from. The operator was having trouble understanding Goddard and kept repeating the wrong location back to him. At the same time, other students were trying to barricade the classroom door that for some reason wouldn't or couldn't lock. "After that, I saw bullet holes start coming through the door," Goddard said. "It looked like he was trying to shoot the lock out. When he started firing at the door, I hit the floor."

    After a few seconds, Cho came into the room. Goddard, his view of the classroom door partly obstructed by a desk, got his first glimpse of the killer. "He had on boots, dark pants and a white shirt. All of the students were on the ground, and he just started walking down the rows of desks, shooting people multiple times. He didn't say anything. He didn't demand anything. He was just shooting." The 911 operator was still on the phone, and Goddard, not wanting to draw attention to himself, dropped it to the floor. A girl named Heidi picked it up, begging the police to hurry. But it was too late, and Cho turned toward them. "I think he heard the police on the phone," Goddard said. "He shot some people near me, he shot the girl across from me in the back. Then I felt a very forceful rush of air and a pinch or a sting in my leg." Goddard felt himself flinch when the bullet hit him, but he did his best to stay still, to play dead. "Nobody tried to get up and be a hero," he said. Then the shooting stopped.

    ReplyDelete
  26. I would never ascribe Prof Librescu's actions to mere instinct. I would never ascribe any hero's actions to mindless reaction. Nor any villian's.

    I'm a firm believer in free will and all that entails.

    ReplyDelete
  27. By JONATHAN KARL
    BAGHDAD, April 19, 2007 —
    ... Gates told reporters he would remind the Iraqis that time was running out.

    "Frankly, I would like to see faster progress," Gates said, referring to the Iraqi political reconciliation process.

    The United States is sending an additional 28,000 troops to Iraq to "buy time" for the Iraqi government. But the Iraqis have failed to deliver on basic political issues, such as sharing Iraq's oil revenue, despite repeated promises.

    "I am sympathetic with some of the challenges they face, but, by the same token. … The clock is ticking," Gates said.

    U.S. officials are privately upset that the Iraqi Parliament, which has yet to enact any key laws on reconciliation, plans to go on recess for several weeks in June, just as last of the additional U.S. forces in the surge are due to arrive in Iraq.

    ReplyDelete
  28. I haven't been on a plane in quite some time, but This would sure make me nervous too.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Ash,

    Take our own creature Habu, he certainly has expressed a willingness to commit violence, on a HUGE scale as well. He, like CHO, thinks it is only directed at his enemies though, as if that were a legit excuse

    Ash, Comparing me to CHO is a bit over the top, but since most bloggers have long since realized you're an idiot, I'll just consider the source. Also if you're intent on elevating me to the level with mass murderers for goodness sakes get me up there with Attila the Hun or some of those fellas.

    However we seem to have acquired a number of new posters who may not be familiar with the context in which I would rain death on people. Those people are, and always have been specifically identified as enemies of the United States, such as AQ and it's ilk.
    I certainly don't believe in mass killings of innocent college men and women. You purposefully distorted my well known position of unrestricted warfare against our enemies in the ME.

    To continue a short summary for our new posters the nexus of my war philosophy is akin to that of US Grant,WT Sherman,and more recently General Curtis LeMay. I strongly advocated bombing Iraq into rubble for the specific reason that it would save troops lives in the long run , and that power of that nature is easily understood in the Arab culture.
    Precision bombing to the Arabs looks weak while to us it looks smartly high tech and powerful.
    Well our vision of the world and power do not remotely fit the Arab world of power. So I recommended a decimation of them to gain the above plus a huge psychological advantage. The type you can't get by handing out candy bars to kids who know where the IED's are planted.

    So Ash, I share my methodology of warefare with those who have won wars before by using the total destruction of the enemy strategy. It worked in Germany and Japan, both of which we rebuilt. We had the choice to do the same in Iraq but decided we were now to civilized to defeat an entire population ....we've been paying the price ever since.

    Ash, you are a do-do head.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Here's Another Damned Good Plan

    Thankfully, I got to get to work, so I won't drive myself nuts reading any longer today.

    ReplyDelete
  31. Trish
    I would never ascribe Prof Librescu's actions to mere instinct. I would never ascribe any hero's actions to mindless reaction. Nor any villian's.

    I'm a firm believer in free will and all that entails


    Trish, have you ever had a rock or stone hit your car windsheild?
    Have you ever accidently dropped something heavy that's headed for your foot?
    Has anyone ever thrown a softball at you so that the trajectory would take it directly into your face?

    If any of these or similar incidents have occured to you I submit you would have instinctually flinched, moved your foot,or taken other evasive action.

    I have no difficulty with free will but it requires a thought process beyond the time humans are capable of reacting to certain situations.
    Something heads for your face and you flinch and probably close your eyes...instinct, not free will does that.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Ash,

    yuz dun gotz the offical bad juju put on ya. I done been down to da bog and seen da voodoo lady.

    yuz got a curse on you now...bad,bad juju come to you

    ReplyDelete
  33. "I have no difficulty with free will but it requires a thought process beyond the time humans are capable of reacting to certain situations."

    No. It doesn't.

    ReplyDelete
  34. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  35. Habu, it is very difficult to take you seriously when you contradict yourself.

    For example in that last post you write:

    "I certainly don't believe in mass killings of innocent college men and women."

    and then you write (in the same post):

    "I strongly advocated bombing Iraq into rubble..."

    Is "college" an important modifier in your first statement or "innocent" or both? Does that really matter because both "innocent" and "college" people will be killed enmass by bombing Iraq to rubble (or nuking Iran as you've so often urged us).

    You seem to think that all war should be 'total war' which places you firmly on the side of immoral. We are not engaged in 'total war' in Iraq nor should we be.

    Total war from wiki:

    "Thus, definitions do vary, but most hold to the spirit offered by Roger Chickering's definition in Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914: "Total war is distinguished by its unprecedented intensity and extent. Theaters of operations span the globe; the scale of battle is practically limitless. Total war is fought heedless of the restraints of morality, custom, or international law, for the combatants are inspired by hatreds born of modern ideologies. Total war requires the mobilization not only of armed forces but also of whole populations. The most crucial determinant of total war is the widespread, indiscriminate, and deliberate inclusion of civilians as legitimate military targets.""

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war

    note also at wiki that they cite as examples WWII and the US Civil war as examples of total war and you also hold those examples up as how you think we should wage war in Iraq.

    ReplyDelete
  36. Trish,

    "Startle Pattern, an extremely rapid psychophysiological response of an organism to a sudden and unexpected stimulus such as a loud sound or a blinding flash of light. In human beings it is characterized by involuntary bending of the limbs and a spasmodic avoidance movement of the head. Musculature returns to normal in less than one second, although elevations in heart rate, respiration, and skin conductance persist slightly longer. The startle pattern occurs in all normal humans and all mammals when tested in a relatively uniform manner. The pattern is resistant to extinction or modification by learning, although its intensity may be reduced by repetition or anticipation. The response seems to be an instinctive mechanism for self-defense and, in humans, is probably the initiating element of more general emotional reactions, both motor expressions and conscious experiences. The startle reaction—known as the Moro, or Moro embrace, reflex in children—is particularly conspicuous in infants up to three or four months old."
    Startle reaction

    it is characterized by involuntary bending of the limbs and a spasmodic avoidance movement of the head.

    Doesn't sound like free will to me.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Ash,
    You are an idiot, just like Habu said. I've read your laughly pitiful posts before and noted that even back in the BC days you were considered a joke.

    I have also followed Habu's post. While he may be more violent than you would like his grasp of warfare is far superior to yours.

    ReplyDelete
  38. Now I shall ignore you and your contributions. They are a waste of time.

    ReplyDelete
  39. "Now I shall ignore you and your contributions. They are a waste of time."

    Now you're gonna have to sit on your hands.

    From here on out.

    ReplyDelete
  40. Let's make a note of it, ash.

    Sparrowhills shall ignore you and your contributions.

    ReplyDelete
  41. If Sparowhills has developed the ability to overcome his instinct to focus, and his instinctual needs for bonding, he will be successful.
    I'm not bettin on it!
    ---
    Vital Instincts

    I asked myself “what if it is it’s not about territorial instincts that cause the problem in companies, or in the world for that matter?” What Darwin said about survival of the fittest is only half of the story. I decided that human beings have vital instincts that are alive all the time when we feel trust and when we are in a good relationship with someone. When this trust is broken, and we become a fearful and distrusting person there is a loss, or the cutting of those vital instincts. This interruption of communication with someone is actually what causes people to fight and want to survive or focus only on their own self interest.

    Bud: So if I get this right, we all have a need to trust other people and we sort of a bonding need, to be in a relationship with people?

    Judith: Yes.

    ReplyDelete
  42. OTOH, we do instinctively withdraw from painful circumstances.

    ReplyDelete
  43. Doug,
    Neither bonding nor focus are instinctual.

    Are you joining the parade of fools?

    ReplyDelete
  44. The Orienting Response is innate, whether we call it instinctual or not.
    What is your source?

    ReplyDelete
  45. Orienting Response (OR)
    is what I meant by focusing.

    ReplyDelete
  46. Aquarium,

    In your 2:44 post you conflate instinct with reflex. Why did you avoid using the very well known distinctions?

    ReplyDelete