Slashdot Mirror
Both Parties Ignore the Facts
An anonymous reader writes "Any democrat will tell you the republicans ignore the facts. Any republican will tell you the democrats ignore the facts. Turns out they're right. A new study monitored brain activity of partisans; they shun logic and use emotional processing centers to justify their candidate's contradictory statements. 'With their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix.'"
Definition of authoritarian adj 1: characteristic of an absolute ruler or absolute rule; having absolute sovereignty; "an authoritarian regime"; "autocratic government"; "despotic rulers"; "a dictatorial rule that lasted for the duration of the war"; "a tyrannical government" [syn: autocratic, dictatorial, despotic, tyrannical] 2: likened to a dictator in severity [syn: dictatorial] 3: expecting unquestioning obedience; "he was imperious and dictatorial"; "the timid child of authoritarian parents"; "insufferably overbearing behavior toward the waiter" [syn: dictatorial, overbearing] n : a person behaves in an tyrannical manner; "my boss is a dictator who makes everyone work overtime" [syn: dictator]
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
This is why to be scientifically credible, results of studies must be reproducible.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
There are other choices. http://lp.org/
I've even heard (sorry no reference for this) that it can happen in everyday motor tasks - some drivers even "wish" pedestrian's away and end up driving dangerously because of something like a confirmation bias in their desire to get where they are going. It's strange how the mind can fool itself. You'd think evolution would have removed it ("I want a drink of water but that tiger by the lake is stopping me - hey! If I ignore the tiger, I can have a drink!?!")
This has been known about (empirically) since the 1960's under cognitive confirmation bias, but I guess it's nice to see an activation study just to confirm what psychologists have known for decades (and that everyone else has known about for millenia).
bang goes my karma... again...
Absolutely. Professor John Lott discovered that when more guns are sold to peaceful citizens, crime drops.
To use an overused example, imagine that you are a criminal and you have two towns to choose to rob a house from. One town lets anyone have a gun for any reason. The other town bans guns entirely. Which town will you go to?
Gun regulations give criminals the equivalent of a sign that says "Rob Me!" in your yard.
You just described trying to buy alcohol in Arkansas. It's laughable to make it nearly impossible to legally purchase a product that is legal to own, legal to transport and legal to consume.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Remember that while they do use the same name, they are not the same people, don't have the same goals nor the same views on the world.
The Republican party was once standing at the left of the United States political scene. This is no longer the case, and there is no way in hell you can assimilate the current neo-con republican party with the humanitarian progressive republican party of the 19th century.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Miami has the highest crime rate in the country, and has for some time. And the largest amount of guns per person. Highest murder rate, everything. There are plenty of arguments on both sides for this debate.
You're right -- I should have provided more information.
The author was Carl R. Pacifico. The document has not been peer reviewed, and the full paper, 'The Human Thinking Process - A Hypothesis in Evolutionary Neuropsychology' (pdf) has only been published on the internet through Drexel Univeristy's Carl. R. Pacifico Professorship of Neuropsychology, which he funded, so can't be considered an unbiased peer review.
As he died last month, he won't have a chance to conduct further research to prove or disprove his hypothesis.
I'm not in the field, myself, so I can't make a judgement if any of his research is sound
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I think the problem is more the opposite: elections aren't hotly contested enough. Consider that in the 2004 elections only 2% of the of the seats in the House of Representatives we're considered "in play". That means that 98% of of congressman pretty much had re-election "in the bag", and didn't have any need to make political compromises in order to get more votes and be re-elected. Because of that, they have no motivation to do anything but play to their established base.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Canada has a strong multi-party system. Look at the results from Monday's election: Conservatives won 124 seats, Librals 103, Bloc Quebecois 51, New Democratic Party 29, with the Green party not winning any seats but getting nearly 5% of the vote. Granted, only the Conservatives and Librals have actually won an election, but the other parties form a very strong opposition, especially when the winning party does not actually have a majority.
There is also more variation between these parties than between the US Democrats and Republicans, even discounting the Bloc, which is essentially a separatist party. I think the multi-party system encourages more variation, because if two parties become too similar in their agendas, other parties are there to fill in the void.
Unfortunately many criminals have poor impulse control and critical reasoning... it's doubtful that they would consider something like this when it would mean having to travel somewhere else and delay their crime.
Except that when Florida passed it's concealed carry weapons law, muggings and robberies in Florida dropped while there was a coincident increase in muggings and robberies in the Georgia and Alabama counties closest to Florida. Criminologists are still debating the full significance of that data, but it appears that some fraction of criminals decided that it was too risky to face a legally owned gun when trying to take someone's wallet or cash register contents and moved to where that chance of encountering a gun was lower.
Another enterprising group of criminals in Florida discovered a way to make certain that their victims didn't have guns and started attacking people in rental cars (presumably tourists from out of state or out of country who couldn't possibly have a "resident only" CCW license). These attacks were specifically mentioned in the passage of laws in many states that prohibit rental cars from placing any distinguishing marks on the cars.
Still another datapoint is that when British criminals break into a home, it appears that they prefer to make certain the residents are in the home. In the US, criminals make substantial efforts to make certain that the residents have left before breaking and entering. This effect is further exaggerated in parts of the country where citizen gun ownership is prevalent (Texas). The conclusion I draw from this is that gun ownership rates do have an affect on criminal behavior, though I will concede that other factors may also be influencing these behavior.
While I agree with your basic assessment of average criminal intelligence, it appears that they do exhibit limited powers of rational decision making and risk awareness, specifically around the possibility of their victims being able to fight back.
Regards,
Ross
No, that's an excellent SCOTUS nominee: regardless of his beliefs and attitudes on a subject, a Supreme Court Justice is supposed to determine what the LAW says on a subject.
If the law already contained the answers, we wouldn't need to be very concerned with who the justices are. The problem is, the justices are responsible for INTERPRETING the law, and applying a collection of more general legal principles to specific cases for which no specific law has been written. This is not a mechanistic process of reading the law, knowing what it says, and then regurgitating this. Any interpretation process must in fact bring a bit of personal beliefs into the process, and thus, the beliefs and opinions of the justice on how areas of the law should be interpreted are everything in determining what sort of justice a person will be.
He did not dodge questions because his personal opinions are unrelated to the process of judging, but simply because he was heavily coached to do this so that a controversy could be avoided and the confirmation could proceed by simple party majority without any substantial discussion or review of his actual interpretation of the law.
If you feel that an unthinking government drowning in rhetoric with no substantial debate is good for society, then I guess go ahead and support a process like that, but I for one have have problems with it.
Do we want the government to run an air-traffic-control system?
Amend the constitution.
To test drugs and medical devices?
Amend the constitution.
To fund the development and production of influenza vaccines?
Amend the constitution.
To enforce environmental standards?
Amend the constitution.
This libertarian doesn't believe the government should do nothing. This libertarian believes the federal government was given a certain set of enumerated powers. The founders didn't pull these powers out of their ass. They were thoughtful and based on the bad experiences under monocracies and theocracies they had escaped from. The rest of the powers are left the states or the people themselves. If we wish the federal government to have more powers we go through the rather onerous process to amend the constitution. In that process we consider the powers we are giving up, with the burden to convince being on those that want the new power granted.
What we have now, with unlimited government, I only need have a special-interest group convince congress they need be involved in my home, school, personal decisions, medical decisions, what I ingest, smoke, and soon what I eat. They go everywhere and they always have some group and some justification to go there.
Rather than let the mob rule, this libertarian would rather that the law would rule. The constitution is to protect us from the people and set the barriers high when giving the feds new powers.
First of all, there are way more than two political parties. Thus, there are way more than two "sides", which most people ignorantly arguing politics fail to realize/acknowledge.
Second, the adversarial system is what's crushing the efficacy of our political system. With two major parties that have passed a great deal of legislation to keep it exclusively two major parties, we've set up a system that "us" vs. "them". The main problem with that is at any given point in time, about half of the people involved want the system to fail, so they can get their people in office. Democrats want Bush to fail just as much as Republicans wanted Clinton to fail (speaking in generalities, of course).
Both parties scream bloody murder at each other in order to scare people in to voting for them, if for no other reason than to make sure "the other side" doesn't win. Take any major issue in the past 20-30 years and measure as objectively as possible the change since the beginning of the issue. Have abortion rights changed significantly since Roe vs. Wade? No. Has Social Security collapsed? No. Have taxes gone up under both Republican and Democratic supervision? Yes.
For all of their shouting about the "crisis" of this or that, we're just fine. To the average American in their routine life, not a whole lot has changed as a result of any political action.
So stop shouting about how "they" are going to ruin everything, and start figuring out how to work with whoever IS in office to help them make the best choices.
the KillerB
You may indeed be wrong. Your name just one example, but you could as easily have chosen any of the democracies in North West Europe or Scandinavia -- off the top of my head, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway have multi-party democracies, and are all considered stable democracies.
This does of course not imply that two-party democracies can't be stable, or would be less stable, but I can imagine they might lead to the kind of polarisation that can be observed in the United States.