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Brain Differences In Liberals and Conservatives
i_like_spam writes "Scientists from NYU and UCLA report in Nature Neuroscience that the brains of Democrats and Republicans process information differently. This new study finds that the differences are apparent even when the brain processes common information, not just political topics. From the study, liberals were more likely to be accurate and showed more brain activity in the region associated with analyzing conflicts. A researcher not affiliated with the study stated, liberals 'could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.' Moreover, 'the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry... as a flip-flopper.'"
On the contrary, when you look at that New Testament in depth, most of the ideas put forth were not terribly new, but were actually pointers to older ideas.
One highly subjective, criminally over-simplified take on the whole liberal/conservative question is: it boils down to one of modeling society. If you want "one big family" then you lean to the left, and want more socialized policies. If you question whether people scale well and want more individual responsibility and less safety net, then you might prefer conservative policies.
I'm looking forward to further research that correlates liberal/conservative preference with population density. It seems that the more urbanized people are, the greater the comfort level with shifting responsibility/authority to the government.
Good news, bad news: who can say?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This really takes the cake, kdawson.
Seriously, how long did it take you to come up with this one? Are you even pretending to be impartial or marginally even-handed any more? This is just pathetic... I've been a reading of Slashdot for forever and this kind of crap (your pattern of stories, namely) ranks up there with Jon Katz in terms of sheer, mindboggling tone-deafness.
Do us all a favor and quit. I hear they're looking for aggregators at the Huffington Post. And I'm sure DailyKos would love to have you.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
(Please take the text below as a non-serious, jest.)
If "liberal" brains are more capable of dealing with changing circumstances, would that not be a trait that increases the change of survival and thus be an trait that is selected-in over time?
In other words, is the conservative brain a recessive trait that, if natural selection were occuring in humans, eventually fade away?
(Remember, I'm saying this in jest.)
Deleted
well when the head of a nation is a brain-dead puppet....
Read the article:
"Brain Differences In Liberals and Conservatives
Posted by kdawson on 07-09-11 11:25
from the thinking-differently dept."
Yep that moderator kdawson who has infested slashdot with a lot of crackpot stories lately.
Just saying it like it are.
Republicans still say "you are wrong" and cut it. They really plainly say only this - without any arguments : "you are wrong".
logic and perception doesnt help you there.
Read radical news here
Ah, to sit in wonderment of all that's presented to you, and swallow most of the garbage you're fed. Let's see them map someone who is patently gullible, and see if they have the same amount of brain twittering going on as LIEberals. Certainly a gullible person has to suspend disbelief in order to fall for stuff, right? And wouldn't suspending disbelief require all sorts of brain wave activity? Anyway, I'd rather trust someone who sticks to their convictions than someone who wants to stop and think about every danged thing going on around them. "Incoming!!!" "Well, then, let's stop and think about this..." Yeah, right. or: "Your pants are on fire!" "When you say pants, do you mean..." Wishy washy people cause more problems than they solve.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
From http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html
American Revolution
- In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare; "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."
My contempt for the behavior and beliefs of the two major political parties cannot be adequately expressed in 120 chara
When I was young, I had no heart and I supported right-wing ideas. Today, older and wiser, I have also developed more of a heart and I mostly support left-wing ideas. Whoever made that statement about old person being a liberal having no brains is obviously wrong.
Meh.
"Something that bugs me is the number of people, liberal and conservative alike, that really believe that just having wealth proves you're more intelligent than the average person and deserve to be in a position of leadership."
It's the difference between those who talk a big game and those who do. They may not deserve it, but they've certainly earned it.
"They don't take into account that some people are born more privileged than others and therefore have an easier path to wealth, that some people have fewer morals to get in their way, or that some people are just lucky."
You speak of a minority however. The majority are hardworking and have earned their place. Fortunately they don't draw the attention of the paranoid.
"A lot of people really do believe we should be ruled by our corporate overlords even though they think it'd be horrible to be under the thumb of a monarch."
What an utter load of BS. Speak for yourself. The majority of people who go on to become business leaders don't even know you exist, and certainly aren't interested in ruling such a trite person.
"To me, that seems to be one of the issues of mass hysteria that is common in todays society."
Or just the rantings of the paranoid who see overlords everywhere.
"Someday will people be looking at us as if we were idiots in the way we look back at people that let themselves be ruled by monarchs and tyrants?"
As opposed to what? You obviously failed history. We have always had monarchs (or the equivalent) and tyrants. We've also had plenty of good people in the same time periods. "Back in the day" gets pretty old, quick!
yeah and the tram also goes in a more structured manner.
i am 27. old enough to value experience, still young enough to learn new things. cannot write the latter about you, though.
one cannot teach an old dog new tricks, eh?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Interesting, I have always said that it is easy to be a republican, all it requires is a small mind and a small heart.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
He'll probably just think you can't spell "sweeten" and wonder what you're talking about.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
maybe you should go talk to General Betray Us and see how astute he is
Mass murder is funny to you? Why does that not surprise me?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
> maybe you should go talk to General Betray Us and see how astute he is
You know, I'm actually happy as hell Move On bought that ad. Because if that wasn't 'questioning his patriotism' then I really don't know what it would take to qualify. So now that Move On has officially (buying a full page in the NYT is about as overt an act as one can imagine) declared their belief that questioning the patriotism of a highly decorated general who, to date, was 100% free of taint to his professional reputation is now fair play. I certainly can't see how they can object when we now take the obvious next step.
I now put on the table for discussion THEIR patriotism. This ragtag band of misfits, losers and socially dysfunctional turds, living in their mothers basements, blogging in their underwear that calls itself the netroots (nutroots) has more in common with UBL (did you actually READ that idiot kostard's rant?) than anything American. If you f*cking Noam Chompsky reading, Hugo Chavez lovin' socialist morons hate America so much, why don't you migrate? We are trying to build a wall on our Southern border to keep people OUT, but we certainly wouldn't try to keep yer sorry butts IN.
Democrat delenda est
In the late 1800's and early 1900's, the free-market economies of the West showed an alarming tendency to reward people based on their individual merit and notbased on who gave birth to them. People from the lower classes and non-European races kept bubbling up the economic and social ladder in historically unprecedented numbers. Something had to be done. Fortunately, people claiming to be scientist rode to the rescue. They claimed to demonstrate that certain groups of people inherently lacked the mental faculties to function as free citizens. As such, restrictions on their political and economic freedoms were perfectly justified. Today, we see that the free-market of ideas has not rewarded a certain segment of the political spectrum in the manner it once did. The masses no longer kowtow to a intellectual elite as they did in the mid-20th century. Something had to be done. Now we see a large number of supposed scientist. linguist, political scientist and journalist producing works that explain that that modern Leftist fail in the political marketplace not because their archaic ideas no longer work but rather because the rest of the population is so stupid and easily led. The point of these works isn't to understand how people think but rather to reinforce the belief in intellectual superiority on which modern Leftism rest. I predict they will end up on the ash heap of embarrassments to science just as the works of the previous century's bigots did.
IMNSHO, you don't truly understand the value of experience until you have teenage children.
Only morons have children.
#!/
where the fuck does he comeup with this crap!?
Fuck KDawson and fuck slashdot!
If it has not been said, let me be the first to say it. The level of brain activity is directly proportional to one's agreement on certain public policy issues:
The elite ask one heartlander "What is two plus two?" He answers with "Two plus two equals four." They respond with "So? Honesty requires no brain activity." Another such individual is asked and he replies with "Two plus two equals four and nothing else." Within two clock cycles of their liberally hard-wired brains they shout "You are a sexist, racist, homophobic bigot! We smell Zyklon-B! We smell Zyklon-B!" and other such intellectualy gifted responses. A third replies with "Two plus two equals anything you like." They return with "He is showing some heightened brain activity." The fourth such person responds with "Two plus two equals anything but four." Their delighted response is "Now THAT'S getting the grey matter in the pink, yeah! You're one of US! WooHoo! Let him into our thinker's circle. Attaboy! Now THAT'S brain activity!" as they high-five the contestant.
Let's replay this with some twists:
One may respond with "Two plus two equals four, and nothing else, and I am black." They respond with "Uncle Tom, Oreo, Bought-n-Sold, etc. You're not one of us!" Another may respond with "Two plus two equals four and nothing else, and I am Asian." They respond with "Model Stereotype, engineering material, let's move on..." Now this is the one that causes the elites to 'smoke their windings' so to speak. This one answers "Two plus two equals four and nothing else and I am a Jew." The elites whisper amongst themselves, saying "We know that such a statement is inherently bigoted. However if we call him on that, he'll brand us as antisemites! He's trying to put us in an irresolvable situation! What can we do?!"
Their final response is: "We decline to comment."
Remember class, Morality surpresses brain activity.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.