" there's too much weight of history for the European countries" 
 
Sure, look at Germany. Clearly modern Germany has a lot to be proud of. However if you start teaching the holocaust and guilt to 7 year olds then you will get that push back ( Pride == white pride!!) 
 
. I would imagine that most people in the West would give their country between 2-3. If not they dont know the world, nor the history of the world. We live in good times. Our countries generally run well. We should be proud. The question as phrased is not really, even, nationalistic.

|ADHD children are given a stimulant like Ritalin, which like amphetamine is thought to increase brain dopamine levels, allowing them to be happy in the low-stimulation environment of the classroom.| 
 
Is there a drug for Asbergers, then? ( Asbergers being the other end of the scale, for kids who are not louder than normal, but quieter than normal). 
 
Eventually we are going to medically drug about 80% of the population. We should do something about height too. Sure, at the moment we worry about gigantism, and dwarfism, but what about the minor level dwarfism for people at 5'9'' and less, and the minor levels of gigantism for people at 5'11'' and more? Can we have drugs for that? 
 
This is a bit off-topic but I am annoyed because a nephew - who is quietish - now "has" asbergers. His brother - who is a firebrand - will "have" ADHD no doubt in a few years. Future generations will consider this the majoe crime against children. Every generation has a crime against children.

"thanks to penicillin, but the mob attributed the magic to the NHS." 
 
Well given that many of them would not have gotten penicillin without the NHS, that made the mob rather smart.

News International are going to charge soon. That will end the free part of web 2.0

Jesus the first two comments were a bit misinformed. 
 
1) Microsoft never owned, or wrote, any of Apple's code. MS did invest a relatively tiny amount of money in Apple when Jobs came back to the business - that was merely a gesture albeit a nice one. MS, on the other hand, did get some code from Apple - or rather a licence to use the graphical elements. Apple later sued MS, in a case that deserves to be better known ( because if they won then MS would have had to shut up shop) since they were claiming copyright over the "look and feel" of the GUI based OS. MS did not have something like the Mac until 1995, before then most people booted into DOS. 
 
2) Apple is no more a closed system than MS. It has a set of API which people can write against to write their programs, and that includes the MS application team which has being doing that since *before* the release of the original Mac. I think Word was being developed on prototypes. 
 
As to agnostics comments, as far as I know, MS were the first to use the Mac's api to give a WYISWIG ( as was then said) look and feel. If you ever see an old dated 1980's computer with WordPerfect ( and my Dad had one) you will see that you had to tag WP - much as you do in these comments. You could do that only via command-keys ( or macros) - i.e boldify this word but what you saw was boldify this /b/word/bb/ ( or something of that nature). You didnt see the look and feel until you printed out the page. As for the desktop publishing, for that reason, Mac's dominated from the 80's. They were *actually* a decade ahead.  
 
Word on Windows had the ability to do some WYSIWIG, but it needed users to learn a new set of commands. Secretaries already had learned off the complicated nomenclature for WP. The Mac version of Word had menus from the start Unlike WP ( which came later). So Word was better on the Mac. 
 
It wasn't all that better on Windows, no menus, where it was not truly typefaced, unlike the Mac ( therefore not really WSIWIG). What I mean by that is you could see boldification, but not font changes on the screen. If you were serious about publishing you owned a Mac - that was their niche at the time.  
 
WordPerfect lost their own battle by not porting to Windows in time, possibly because of hostility to MS. They didnt get their windows version out until months after Windows 95, the first version of Windows where people did not live in DOS most of the time.  
 
In any case none of this proves Agnostics point. Here is the money quote from the wiki article on WP. 
 
"While WordPerfect retained a majority of the retail shelf sales of word processors, Microsoft gained market share by including Word for Windows in its Windows product on new PCs. Microsoft gave discounts for Windows to OEMs who included Word on their PCs. When new PC buyers found Word installed on their new PC, Word b
More....

"And of all the pre-1900 English stuff I've read, Jane Austen is by far the crappiest. Read George Elliot, or Thomas Hardy. Skip Austen." 
 
She has very little understanding outside her own little world, yes, but she writes very well. And thats good enough. 
 
Worst "good" writer ever in terms of not understanding human nature. Victor Hugo. Les Miserables is the worst good book ever.

So nobody starts with the wombles, narnia, faraway tree etc. at the age of 7 anymore? I know plenty kids who do, but it is a different culture I suppose.

I too once lived, albeit for a short time, in the modern Sodom which is San Francisco.  
 
One thing that every Irish man gets in American - although San Fran is relatively well educated, and so I got it less than other contemprariues. elsewhere in the US - is questions about the "war". Sometimes I did get the question though. 
 
No point getting in to history. I just tend to say I kept my head down ( for the record I came from the republic where there was little or no spillover) 
 
one day I am watching the news, and they mention a killing in Oakland. It was October. It was the third item. The reason it was mentioned at all - it was the 100th killing that year ( as far as I can see, though, all killings in the UK make the news, and probably National news too). 
 
Anyway, I did some simple maths in my head. 100 deaths per 300K population per year, is equivalent to 600 deaths per year in a population of 1.8 million ( the population of Northern Ireland), which would be 18,000 over thirty years, 6 times more than the death toll in Northern Ireland. ( Where I didnt grow up, and which was miles from me). I take an average of 100 for Oakland, becasue they seemed a bit shocked by it happening in October. Christmas seemed the time to reach the century ( otherwise the oakland total is 120, and the per capita killings are 7 times higher). 
 
I could ask people in SunnyVale - one of American's safest cities in Silicon Valley - what is is like living in a warZone, I suppose. but you learn to hold your tongue.

Kurzwell's speach at TED here

"Otto Kerner, the British may be out of (southern) Ireland. But they seem to have settled Cornwall, Wales & Scotland just fine." 
 
Hmm, if by settled you mean replaced the natives with Anglo Saxons, then no, they havent - not even in Cornwall. Actually Ireland is more settled with English people than either Scotland, or Wales, although their descendants consider themselves Irish now, of course.  
 
and the scottish national party is a relatively vibrant outfit. in contrast, despite the minority persistence of welsh it seems that that nation's small size and proximity to england has allowed it to become an adjunct to its neighbor to a far greater extent. 
 
Actually the language, Welsh, is more vibrant than Irish ( Gaelic) in ireland, or Scottish-Gaelic in Scotland. Wales is quite different to England, seems like a different country and not just a region ( I cant say the same about Cornwall despite the celtic crosses and Cornish flags). 
 
The UK has about 5 nationalist-separatist parties - Plyd Cymru in Wales, A Cornish nationalist Party ( Cornwall is merely a county so independence is a pipe dream), the Scottish Nationalists (SNP), Sinn Fein, and the English Democrats. It also has pan-British nationalisms opposed to either the EU or immigration- the BNP and the UKIP.  
 
These are not insignificant parties - in the recent Elections the party of Government came behind the Cornish Nationalists in Cornwall, the SNP in Scotland, Sinn Fein in NI ( where they dont organise) and close to PC in Wales - and across the Kingdom as a whole behind the UKIP ( United Kingdom Independence Party). The BNP - a once fringe outfit with roots in Neo-Nazism - polled 1 million votes. 
 
A dis-united Kingdom.

". Give your 1960 man an iPhone, and show him Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Babblefish and Youtube. Then use the GPS/navigation computer to guide you home." 
 
If the 1960's man is into science fiction then he would expect to have a philosophical conversation with the computer. Although he might be expecting a mainframe. The calculator wouldnt impress him at all.

"And anyway, Microsoft is way more innovative, on a smaller level, than other related companies (like, e.g., Apple). Note that nearly everyone prefers their products over the competitors' -- Windows OS, Internet Explorer, and the Office Suite being the most obvious examples." 
 
Um, no it isnt. You are talking about original ideas, not new implementations of old ones. 
 
Microsoft is a largely reactive company which has used it's muscle to copy other peoples ideas: Windows copies the original Mac OS, which was the first commercial GUI only OS. Excel was designed to take on Lotus 1-2-3 and won because of it's OS' predominance and the failure of OS/2 ( a failure by a large, then almost monopolistic company called IBM) . Netscape had the first popular browser and MS takes that on with IE. MS writes T-SQL to compete with standard SQL And tries to compete with Google on search, and Apple - the iPod - with the Zune. The entire Office suite takes on competitors who invented technologies elsewhere but were overtaken by MS's monopolistic Juggxrnaught.  
 
No innovation. No new ideas. Just copying. 
 
Most of what it does, it does badly. Windows was a GUI only OS in 1995, 12 years years after the Mac was GUI only, T-Sql is a mess, IE is not used by anybody I know, and probably only by people who do nothing to their computer. So its use is an artifact of moms and dads not changing stuff on the monopoly OS they get with the cheap Dell.  
 
Where MS does not have that advantage over other companies - like in search or phone oses - it may as well hand in the towel. There is no there there. 
 
I have no idea how this relates to the rest of your thesis, although I agree that innovation is slowing down, I cant agree on the cause. The MS comment, though, shows a lack of knowledge which puts in doubt the rest.

Yes, the Diarmuid and Grainne story seems to show that the inbuilt evolutionary bias for determining a love mate were probably formed in the hunter gather era, rather than the agricultural settled era. 
 
Diarmuid was young, tall, handsome, strong etc. 
All useful as a hunter, less useful when you could marry the King in the era she lived in. In fact the latter option was - genetically the better - for her offspring but she wasn't naturally attracted to Fionn, despite his status. 
 
Some wmen are attracted to wealth and status though, look at the older richer man and his younger trophy wife. Has that evolved since the agricultural era? Would a modern Grainne now marry the King?

Some interesting stuff on temperance from the Catholic encyclopedia ( from circ. 1920 i guess) 
 
here http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14482a.htm 
 
Note how England created it's gin problem by banning the import of French spirits, and then tried to solve the gin problem by making beer cheap. 
 
( I also liked the way they called whiskey acquae vitae)

how do you explain this thread? ;-)  
 
yeah, I read that thread after I published my comment. Now, I understand :-)

Hmm. I actually like the commentary on pieces here as much as the pieces. Also I like to see my comments appear after I write them. As far as I can see right now the last four articles have achieved no comments, although some may be enqueued. One of the probems with that kind of moderating system is that commentators cant really quote, or react to other comments, just to the main article, which clearly limits discussion. 
 
Your call, of course, and your time on the line. You may want a quieter life.

From the bbcs history pages 
 
" Elizabeth personally expressed a desire to learn Gaelic, and demanded a Gaelic translation of the New Testament from her bishops - in line with the Protestant insistence on the use of the vernacular in church services - but others feared that Gaelic services would undermine the government's programme to make Ireland English. Thus, political considerations generally took priority over religious conformity: Gaelic translations of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer only appeared after Elizabeth's death. Nonetheless, the new Protestant ingredient in English identity (God's 'elect nation') also undermined acceptance as Englishmen of Ireland's Catholic Old English." 
 
Later the protestant New English had no interest in extending protestantism, because it reduced their relative privilege. 
 
Protestantism is a nation building project in many respects, since it emphasises the vernacular and puts the local language at the same level as Latin. Besides that it structures the language of itself, by the very writing of a book bound to be prominent in every house in Realm it creates the definitive version of the language ( although there were and remain huge differences in English dialects*). It is an imperialist project, however, when imposed as the vernacular on areas where the language was different. Cornwall for instance, was also home to large anti-Protestant rebellions. 
 
*American speech patterns, particularly it's speechifying, have however been hugely influenced by the King James Bible.

The other thing about white liberalism which I never fail to point out to any upper middle class friends is simple and fairly obvious - the working classes cant afford liberalism. They cant afford to be nonchalant about immigration, which affects their wages materially, and they cant afford to be nonchalant about crime which affects their neighborhoods disproportionately. 
 
The richer classes are unconcerned about these issues precisely because they have ghettoized themselves by distance from the poor and their problems, they are less concerned because they are wealthier. Thus the status signaling here is a display not just of moral status, but a display of wealth.

"that only White People like the "Stuff White People Like"" 
 
They dont. It is a good social satire on a typical sort of whiteness - the type of white person who is tribally white by embracing certain non-intuitive beliefs - like "diversity". The point of this tribal group-think is to distance themselves from other types of white who are in bad odor with a media elite ( and not uncoincidently more working class - the Nascar loving whites). 
 
I lived in the United States for a few years. All my friends were white, with some Asians. Most of their friends were white, with some asians. This was in part a class issue. In part it wasnt. 
 
Once I took a friend to a Irish Folk festival. she remarked that the crowd was very white ( in fact there were a fair amount of Asians, but no blacks). I said the crowd was Irish, not White - a formula of words which confused her, so she shut up. The thing is she used to take me to Indy concerts were absolutely everybody was white ( with some Asians) 
 
That she didnt notice. Irish folk tends to get a bye amongst the elites ( although it is white ethnic) but some of the acts tended towards American country - it is standard practice in Ireland for the fiddle player to play an Appalachian tune now and again, both folk types are related and American folk is derived from Irish. english and Scottish folk. 
 
Anyway, in retrospect that is - I think - what was pissing her off - the country folk signified the wrong type of white. She didnt notice her whites, but these she noticed.

"Denis Dutton's worst writers contest is typically won by arts and humanities people." 
 
Well that is because there is no there there. Write it simply and it obviously false, or simple.  
 
Anyone notice that in Flytes translation of this ( simple sentence) 
 
"I suspect it'll be the first positive review of a right-wing book on Scienceblogs" 
 
becomes this: 
 
"It'll be the first positive review of a right-wing book in Scienceblogs history.." 
 
Suspecting that you are going to do something is not the same as categorically saying you will, in fact no one would write the second sentence having not read the book. So misleading translation.