I don't know, personally, if "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design" is right or not (not having read it myself). However, your assumption that it is wrong without having read it says more about your premise than it does about the book.

IOW, you are not making a logical evaluation of the facts and arguments presented by the book.

I believe that I'll treat your opinion on this subject differently than on those subjects where you have done your research.

URGGH. Maybe I should follow your links before I post. My Bad. I thought you were objecting to the premise of the book itself, not the title.

Again, my sincere apologies. I should have know better than to believe that you would slam a book without at least first perusing it. As a matter of fact, I thought I did, which is why I gave you that undeserved slam in my last post.

A label is accurate if it describes what you are. You can't work it backwards; if you are "conservative" it doesn't prove anything about what you may believe about a particular point.

(Technically it does affect the probability, but given how people screw this point up it's better to argue the absolutist position that a "conservative" or "liberal" can still have any position on any topic, such as "abortion". "Liberal anti-abortionist" or "conservative pro-lifer" are not oxymorons.)

Given the wide variety of meanings of Conservative and Liberal (and I wouldn't even call that a complete accounting), those terms and the corresponding labels are especially meaningless.

There is a large and angry insurgency in each party that doesn't mind losing. Such an insurgency has controlled the LP for decades, and the LP has never won a major election. Such an insurgency is gaining power in the Democratic Party, and they are making no gains. The GOP has such an insurgency, and has been successfully marginalizing it for the last 10 years so.

I don't think thier gains have been a coincindence.

I seem to be in the same bucket as you -- less than thrilled with the rise of the hardline isolationist wing that wants to impose litmus tests on people in their own tent and is so suspicious of "RINOs" that they're about ready to see President Bush impeached (particularly over immigration).

I blame this bunch for the hysteria over Harriet Miers -- you'd think she would have destroyed the Supreme Court from the way people carried on.

I also blame this bunch for the screaming over Dubai Ports World -- you'd think that a worldwide shipping company just has to be a conduit for terrorists if it comes from the UAE, and in fact many of the anti-Dubai people went further and wanted all non-American companies kicked out of our ports because no foreign entity should ever be allowed to operate in U.S. areas as vulnerable as a shipping port (and never mind that the U.S. shipping companies just don't have the capacity to run all U.S. ports).

Then we discovered that our colleagues on the right were flying off the handle over large numbers of people committing the misdemeanor of simply being on U.S. soil illegally. They screamed especially loudly about "amnesty" -- that is, ANY path to citizenship, no matter how long or how onerous, for ANYONE here illegally, no matter how decently he'd behaved while here in the country.

Now we're at the point where "name" conservatives -- not only Pat Buchanan but also George Will and William Buckley -- are declaring our efforts in Iraq to be a failure. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein's thugocracy and freeing 26 million people and setting them on the path to a real democratic government? Killing terrorists by the thousands? Enticing terrorists to fight Americans in Iraq instead of on U.S. soil? And all this at a cost, over three years, of the lives of fewer soldiers than the number of civilians who died in the World Trade Center on ONE DAY in 2001? Sorry, these do not add up to success in Iraq.

Sigh.

I have no idea what's come over these people, but I'm spending less and less time on conservative forums these days.

I used to consider myself conservative. Back before the first Gulf War I found someone who seemed to be speaking for me, Rush Limbaugh. But slowly I realized he was speaking not for me but for the people Barry Goldwater referred to as the "kooks" taking over the GOP, the religious or social conservatives. The concept of "limited" government has been replaced with lip service to "smaller" liberal government. Nothing illustrates this definition of conservatism more than this phone call to Rush's show on May 25, 2001.

There's an mp3 version of that phone call too.