| | Ed, you have a bad habit. You pick a term "neocon" or "entangling alliance" which has an objectively verifiable conventional meaning, and, because you seem to like the sound of it, you adopt it as a buzz-word and run with it, like scissors at pool side, giddy and reckless as a child who thinks his second eye is expendable surpluss.
Read the article on the term Neocon at Wikipedia. Don't just cite it, or look at the letters, but read it. Neocon primarily means a leftist convert to certain conservative policies:
...a criticism against liberals who had "moved to the right". Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist, coined the usage of neoconservative in a 1973 Dissent magazine article concerning welfare policy. According to E. J. Dionne, the nascent neoconservatives were driven by "the notion that liberalism" had failed and "no longer knew what it was talking about."
Note that you will not find William F Buckley mentioned in this rathetr long and actually quite overly broad article. Buckley was a religious conservative two decades before the modern use of Neocon. Indeed, you will find his name in the article on Paleocons> at Wikipedia.
Your use of this buzzword here, like your insistence that animals don't form concepts in the animal consciousness debate, is based on words that you want to impose from the top down, not evidence that you want to integrate from the bottom up. You spent how much time insisting that animals do not copnceptualize, when the single explicit case of Alex the grey parrot proved your desired generalization utterly false. Yes, there is a huge distinction between human conceptualization and the limited abilities of some animals. But the reality of this difference depends on the facts, not the words you use to express your ideas. Words not connected to facts are floating abstractions. The insistence on buzzwords and top down arguments is rationalism, the bane of true objectivists.
I don't expect a reversal of your opinion of Bush, (mine opinion of him is probably worse than yours, and mine has evolved based on his actions, not my preconceptions) or an apology, or especially not an argument in response here. Just please understand what I am saying.
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