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.'"

Comments

Re:Ignoring the Facts: defining "authoritarian"

[dgatwood]

The point of gun control laws should actually be expanded to require gun safety training prior to purchase of one's first firearm....

Not only is expanded sales of guns not guaranteed to reduce crime, it is guaranteed, as you mention, to increase the probability that crime will involve a loaded weapon. But more than that, it is also guaranteed to increase the number of accidental deaths due to firearm discharge. Even now (well, a study in 1997), almost 8% of all handgun deaths due to civilian firearm use were due to accidental discharge (calculated as accidents / (murders + accidents)).

Another purpose of gun control laws is to reduce the rate of crimes of passion--your wife sleeps with somebody else and you have the urge to kill her, so you buy a gun at the store and kill her. With a waiting period (often referred to as a "cooling off period," this actually ends up reducing the number of firearm deaths even without taking into account background checks weeding out purchases by criminals.

Now, I'm not saying that abolishing guns would be a good thing, but some gun control laws actually are for the benefit of the would-be purchaser.... The same goes for cigarette control laws. If adults have to drive a few miles to get cigarettes, the truly addicted will do so. Some of the rest will decide not to do so, and pubic health will improve. More than that, the extra distance will make it significantly less likely for kids to get cigarettes, thus substantially decreasing the number of young people who become addicted to them every year.

There is also no question whatsoever that second-hand smoking causes an increased risk of disease. There have been -countless- studies that show this. Airline stewardesses (back when smoking was allowed there) and restaurant/bar employees have a substantially increased rate of cancer deaths, lung diseases, and heart disease even when all other increased risk factors are factored out. Wives and husbands of people who smoke have also shown similar trends.

Even if you could discount one or two of these studies, there is a -mountain- of evidence. And you will never find any scientist who doesn't acknowledge that smoke and other atmospheric contaminants leads to an increase in asthma in children. While smoking may not be the biggest source of this in general (though it is the primary source for children of smokers), it is a source that can easily be eliminated without any -significant- inconvenience simply through laws that apply reasonable limits to where people can smoke (e.g. no smoking indoors in public buildings, no smoking indoors in a household or car where children are present). The same can't be said about other sources of smoke (power plants, cars, etc.). Thus, we should start by picking the low-hanging fruit and fixing the easily solved problems, -then- work our way to the harder issues.

Arguing that second-hand smoking is not harmful to the public health ranks right up there with arguing against evolution. Anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is almost always trying to escape a feeling of guilt from having caused harm to others.