It's not entirely clear to me that there was a causal connection there.

But to the extent there was, and Mendelberg is right that people consciously repudiate what they may unconsciously be susceptible to, I think you are wrong. Buchanan's comment strikes me as pretty racist, in the same way (as Atwater put it, more or less, "you can't say n***** anymore, so you say 'busing'"). It wasn't explicitly so. And there's no shortage of irrationality in criticism of Obama these days. So I think it needs to be called out.

And let's give them a little bit of a break. The GOP is apparently so impoverished that building their website is a volunteer effort. Under "Code for America," they issued this stirring call to action:

Yes, we are serious (and, seriously geeky---so, we warned). GOP.com is officially recruiting volunteer coders to work with our API. If you write in PHP (the base code of Facebook), and develop applications that we approve of and use at GOP.com, you will be eligible to join the Founder's Club, the team that starts-up the first open API effort for any major political party. Members of the Founder's Club will enjoy direct access to the RNC's new media and technology teams, product previews and will also visit regularly with RNC Chairman, Michael Steele. For instructions on how to access our sandbox, please give us the information, below.

Design, Write, Strategize and Film for America Too!

If you are a graphic designer, SEO expert, AdWords guru, direct-response expert, filmmaker, iReporter or YouTube star, your creativity can help make the difference for America. Just like your coding colleagues, the work you provide, which the RNC accepts and publishes, will make you eligible to join the Founder's Club. Please tell us a little bit about yourselves and, we'll send you some information.

It's pretty indisputable that health care in most prisons is slipshod at best. For the mentally ill, this too often means a lack of, or only intermittent access to, the psychotropics that they need. And that leads to behavior problems. And behavior problems lead to solitary, sometimes to transfer to supermax prisons - where inmates never see another living soul, get out of their cells only one hour a day, never even get to turn the light off. Healthy people are decimated there (the psychologist Stuart Grassian - I think that's his name - has done a lot of work on it). But for the inability to get access to a pill or two a day, we're effectively making people mentally ill, punishing them for it, and in doing so, making their condition a lot worse - if they don't find a way to die, which is honestly a pretty rational response to the situation.

Ugh. Thanks for writing this, TheraP!

You know, I think that the situation is interestingly different. I have to read all this as implying that Cheney and his ilk wanted a real confession. That is, they believed that they would find something real to substantiate their position. Otherwise, the cat comes out of the bag eventually.

At least the extractor of a false confession understands the nature of the transaction. If you torture to corroborate your genuine beliefs, you create a self-contained system of delusions and lies that can go on more or less indefinitely (broken, at least, by term limitations).

On the one hand, we don't really see a need for a psychology of single-celled organisms - their behavior is pretty explicable in terms of biology, reducible to organic chemistry, etc. (Or maybe it is: I stayed the hell clear of O Chem as an undergrad.) On the other hand, we are tempted to think that human beings are complicated in a way that severs the reductive explanatory chain. And fair enough: it's hard to imagine how the omnipotent physicist of LaPlace, knowing everything about the arrangement and trajectory of atoms in space and time, could tell you anything interesting about, say, how I will end this sentence.

As I was sitting, contemplating how my life is riven by constant distractions the other day, it occurred to me that it's a matter of selective processing of information. There's too much out there for any evolutionarily viable organism to take in and process, and as such, there are naturally indeterminately many subsets of information that a complex creature like me (if I may say so myself) could take in. Each complex state I enter, given what I take in, has a range of probable responses. The more complex the organism, presumably, the more varied the possible subsets, and the more varied the possible responses (the tiger peering out from the forest might make me, but not my more fortunate dog, think about Blake, or about the pretty eyes of the girl who dumped me when I was 12, or maybe even about fleeing).

Once you get to a large enough sets of sets of information, behavior becomes difficult for epistemically limited creatures to predict. And reductionism seems implausible, though perhaps only because we're kinda dumb.

So far so good, but assuming that there is an explanatory chain that can account probabilistically for a range of responses, then it seems to me that it's less clear that reductionism implies a lack of something meaningfully like free will - but maybe not exactly like free will. I guess it's a big IF that you can have that kind of indeterminacy at the top of a reductionist science, but if so, it seems to me that, unlike the previous paragraph, the sense of being somehow free isn't illusory.

At least until I ask myself what distinguishes me from the spider, with its much poorer set of possible inputs and responses. It's not a difference of quality, it seems to me. And so for the gap between the spider and the amoeba.

I'm quite sure that the grad student I once was would have scoffed at this, but I'm pretty happy with my current epistemic limitations.