As the left continues to unravel the air is filled with the keening of the abandoned lamenting the loss of cherished illusions.

If you want a sign of how far the yardposts have been moved, look at how carefully John McCain has had to maneuver on the subject of torture so as to not offend his political base, despite his own alleged opposition to Administration policy.

Whatever comes next, however much of the damage can be repaired (by whomever the next national leadership might be), this change will make me sad for the rest of my life. There’s no easy retreat from knowing that a lot of the people around you are willing to sanction torture and are indifferent about the guilt or innocence of those subjected to it.

That's a bit over the top - or perhaps under the bottom. I doubt that there are large numbers of people who are "indifferent about the guilt or innocence" of those who are caught and grilled. It's more that there is a presumption of guilt due to the circumstances in which the prisoners were captured rather than the presumption of innocence we at least claim to support for domestic criminals. However, it is not infrequently the case that some are assumed to be guilty (Duke Lacrosse players for example) due to their circumstances.

Some leftists have become truly unhinged.

Millions of years ago, some ancestral human developed a strange social adaptation geared at rising up against The Man. . .

[A]t a recent weekend meeting at the Santa Fe Institute, several researchers tried to understand the significance of that behavior, said Sam Bowles, a behavioral economist there.

"The pursuit of fairness is common in our ancestors, and it also has a modern application — it's called the welfare state," Bowles said. "In virtually every country where people vote, they vote for a very large fraction of their incomes to go to people less well-off than themselves. There's a lot of experimental evidence that indicates people, perhaps genetically, are oriented toward justice." . . .

"If you look at chimps and bonobos, they both do limited hunting and they both do limited sharing, but they don't approach what human hunters and gatherers do," he said.

Hunters and gatherers who live on large game learned long ago that sharing meat between five or six families was a more effective way to have a steady diet of the rich food.

And that meant alpha-male behavior of hoarding food and only sharing with certain group members had to go, Boehm said.

"The only way to get that meat shared is for the whole group to come together and get rid of the alpha male," he said. "And it appears that happened around 250,000 years ago in human evolution."

OK, this is just a nonsense narrative given that we have everyday evidence that it is completely false. Alpha males, and females, are doing just fine despite the envious coalitions of lesser mortals. So, it's not worth a complete debunking, but the idea that the only thing that prevented hoarding was the threat of reprisal by lesser hunters and gatherers whose incompetence left them with empty bellies is an easy and obvious error. Food doesn't keep without refrigeration of other means of preservation, and besides, lugging a hoard of loot around is a non-starter for those who are on the road so much. Distributing excess that would spoil quickly and is too heavy to lug about is just good economics. It converts goods into credits, which have a better shelf life than raw meat.

The egalitarian phenomenon in early human hunter-gatherer societies was controlled by three major factors — the ability to coordinate, throw or to shoot objects and to shame a target into submission, Bowles said.

If somebody stole, bullied or engaged in behavior the group didn't like, it could be risky business — and in early humans, more often than not, it probably ended in death by a violent coordinated group attack, Boehm said.

"It became costly to individual fitness to run afoul of the group," he said. "It was better to have some sort of internal reckoning before the behavior became fatal."

It sounds kind of truish, maybe like grade school or something, but there was no adult with a monopoly of force to enforce such rules and so it didn't happen like that. Bullies and thieves abound now as they always have done. There was obviously no genetic selection in the past to create some sort of gentile genome. Bullies breed. Lots of babes dig'em. And they are so very handy when the tribe next door decides to raid, rape and pillage. They are sort of like the government: a pain in the arse most of the time but worth the price when things get weird, or so it seems at least.

Humans continued to evolve their social conscience, Boehm said, but started to backslide in some other egalitarian areas about 10,000 years ago when sedentary farming led to the emergence of chieftains, new civilizations and, finally, nations.

"In the first big centralized societies, you have kings as gods and subjects with little control over them," Boehm said. "And it wasn't really until democracy came about that you saw a return to that egalitarian spirit."

And that egalitarian notion has spread for the past few hundred years, although recently — Bowles noted — there's been a little backsliding once again.

"The long-term trend of 100 years has been toward more egalitarian behavior," Bowles said. "But in the last 20 years there's been a turnaround toward an unequal distribution of resources."

The worst places to find that new backsliding trend aren't that far away, he added.

"The best way to determine that is that if the country speaks English, there's been a turnaround," he said.

Amazing. Traits claimed to have evolved over millions of years are undone by a few thousand years of civilization, especially in just the last 20 years, especially where English is spoken! Are these people aware of how ridiculous they sound?

Some have moved past the grieving stage and embraced capitalism.

The privatisation of the Labour Party, mooted here and discussed in the post below, may or may not be a joke. What is well past a joke is the need for creative market-based solutions to the problems of the farther left. The way forward has long since been pioneered by two groups at opposite poles of the British Marxist spectrum: the ultra-left RCP became the contrarian, libertarian think-tank spiked, while the right wing of the old CP morphed smoothly into the left-of-centre think-tank Demos. . .

So how could the rest go?

Let's start from the top. The diverse, diminished, but still millions-strong international Communist movement has global brand recognition, and could very well be run as a franchise. Who better placed to do that than the mighty CPC? This is less outlandish than it sounds. In the 1970s, squabbling sects of US Maoists contended for what they quite openly referred to as 'the China franchise' (the losers had to make do with Albania). Meanwhile, China's official Foreign Languages Publishing House even-handedly flooded the market with cheap, excellent translations of the Marxist classics, whose font and print were so easy on the eye as to make reading even Stalin's duller pages tolerable. . . As for the supply of baseball caps, flags, T-shirts, ball-point pens and other agitational ephemera, it would merely be a matter of changing the stencils in the sweatshops. If 'Free Tibet' flags can turn out to be Made in China, why not Red ones? With its decades of diplomatic experience and ingrained sympathy for national prickliness, the CPC would be well placed - and could well afford - to take an above-the-battle view of the minor differences among its clients.

OK, so we have our Marxist intellectual book publishers, and our socialist street newspaper sellers. That leaves the little matter of the policy that will inform the papers they sell. How is that to be decided, if not by the intellectuals? Why not the rank and file? We search the blogs of the far left with a sinking feeling. How is it that so many bright, well-informed, intelligent people can bear to either carry the cross of their party's line, or drift into inactivity (disguised, often enough, as left-wing blogging)? Again, a clear statement of the problem provides the answer: turn the army of lefty bloggers into a prediction market! The clearing-house of that market would then determine policy from week to week; and a small automated system, from day to day. . .

Speaking of predictions and markets, the rigour of Marxist economics spokespeople would be greatly stiffened if they had to put their money where their mouths are. If their salaries were to be linked to the performance of shares bought and sold on the basis of their predictions, many economic crises that have never happened would never have been predicted. Again, there's a real-world precedent for this: in 1987, while more excitable Marxists (and others) were predicting the final crisis, the Communist Party's pension fund did very well by buying shares hand over fist at the bottom of the crash.

To take this further with more detailed suggestions for the smaller groups - to consider, for example, the Scottish Socialist Party's potential as a relationship counselling service - would take us too far into the realms of speculation.

I predict that this will be the end of capitalism. A flood of leftists lacking the prudence, reticence and sense of propriety of more conservative capitalists will be like those few sociopaths who blight capitalism now, but multiplied many times. It will be something like what happens when a disease germ develops the ability to mutate easily - error catastrophe. Deleterious mutations will happen so quickly, and so often, that it isn't possible to have a stable breeding population. There's no telling what will follow.