Teehee:
I await a rational and respectful discussion of this news.
H.
How do you feel about framing the story as “Conservatives have larger friend centersin their brains?”
So if I get what you’re saying Martin, conservatives are more likely to form a large disorderly mob wielding torches?
Yeah, it actually works for me, since they seem to be inherent joiners and submitters to authority. Neener.
H.
Isn’t the basic impulse to conservatism, before rationality kicks in to reject or justify, the fear of loss of what is? Fear of change (for the worse)? Fear that change will tend to be for the worse? I know that my own personal financial conservatism is motivated by the fear of unexpected and bad change consuming unforseen amounts of money.
It would seem that the more recent excesses in conservative behaviour are about encouraging and preying on that fear, as opposed to a more balanced approach. Because that sort of fear is not wrong, it just needs to be held in the proper perspective and context.
Time to raise the terrar alert level.
The left will claim scientific evidence of what we knew for years anyway!
The right will say that intellectuals should all be drawn and quartered because they are wrong.
“Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” - Yoda.
Ah, now it all makes sense why the world is such a screwed up place. Too many people on the path of the Dark Side of the force.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
…
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
It makes sense. Forget the political meaning and focus on the literal meaning of the word conservative, which later translated to some political ideas. Conservative. It makes sense someone who is prone to fear stuff to be conservative in life.
How so? People who’re antagonistic towards other people and/or their ways of life, would seem to be in much greater danger of suffering some type of harm, than people who’re indifferent to or embrace diversity.
Also, the “fear/conservative” thing doesn’t appear to me to mesh well with the “more social” thing. Hell if you were to ask me, the defining trait of conservatives is that they’re anti-social: if they give a shit about anyone, it’s always in an “I kill youuu!!!” way.
I wouldn’t say anti-social at all. More tribal. Safety in numbers of like-minded individuals. (Totally unlike us liberals flocking to the political forum at Qt3! We’re individualists!) :D
When we’re talking about evolutionary development, we’re talking about tribal/animal traits, not big societal traits. Xenophobia makes perfect sense when you’re a hundred people huddled in a tiny village that never travel outside of your little valley. Look at the tribesmen in the Amazon even today; when someone shows up from the next tribe over, they instantly try to kill them. Conservatives aren’t antagonizing homosexuals, Muslims, whatever in the hopes of riling them up, they’ve just been neutered enough that we don’t let them kill them any more.
Ultimately conservatism is avoidance/fear of change, which encompasses dogmatism, xenophobia, and clannish behavior (friendliness within their own group.)
H.
Not that anybody in this thread is taking this too seriously, but they came to this conclusion by looking at two opposing members of Parliament and about 90 students, so obviously it’s hard to say much without looking at the methodology.
OK, OK, so it makes perfect sense if you don’t view it in the context of present-day technology only :p
I’m such an idiot sometimes. But thanks Houngan :)
No, thank you!
Anyway, it should be easy to gather up a bunch of MRIs and contact the patients to do a political survey. Perhaps not feasible considering medical privacy laws, but we should have the hard MRI/whatever part a few hundred thousand times on file. I’d be curious to see.
H.