Cuyler Page wrote: > Ken, > > Do you mean that the book is available on-line for free? Does it > have all the pages? Does it still smell like a real book? Did I > blow 16 expensive Canadian dollars to buy it as a book? > > cp in bc > (bc = be cheap) c, I don't know what you blew money on but I did a Google and came up w/ an 11,050 word essay titled /Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts/ by Sam Wineburg. I did get the impression that the BOOK may have more essays in it than that one. I am about 1/5th of the way through the essay and, yes, it is very interesting. No, it does not smell like a book... but seeing as one of my tasks for the day was to straighten out a pile of books and dust them I've already smelled enough pages and books for one day. The reason I was fiddling w/ the books was that I was looking for The Paranoia Switch, How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes our Behavior -- and How We Can reclaim Our Courage, by Martha Stout, PhD, psychologist, author of /The Sociopath Next Door/. She writes about fear brokers, as in our post-9/11 political system, and we have too much of that in the USA. It is one of those books that I breezed through on reading and then find myself continually remembering parts of. What I remember is a study in 2005 on behavior genetics using identical/twin fraternal twin protocol in which it was shown that there may be a genetic component to political ideologies. They characterize the two phenotypes as absolutist (conservative) and contextual (liberal). Of the absolutists the characteristics are relatively strong suspicion of out-groups, a yearning for in-group unity and strong leadership, a desire for a clear and unbending moral and behavioral codes, a preference for swift and severe punishments for violations of these codes, a fondness for systematization, a willingness to tolerate inequality among groups, and a fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature. The contextuals, that I won't type out here their characteristics, are the opposite... those of us who tend towards abandoning rules and codes when we run off the boundary of the game field. Essentially the idea is that political positions are hard wired and as they exist at such a fundamental human level they will never change, but that there can be a politics of compromise. Problem is we have politicians in power who prey through fear politics to irritate the differences. It was this book got me started on Hannah Arendt /The Origins of Totalitarianism/. ][<en ** -- To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to: <http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>