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Researchers Claim To Be Able To Determine Political Leaning By How Messy You Are
According to a study to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, you can tell someone's political affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Conservatives tend to be neat and liberals love a mess. Researchers found that the bedrooms and offices of liberals tend to be colorful and full of books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia. Their conservative contemporaries, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials. Their bedrooms and offices are well lit and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags — especially American ones. Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, says these room cues are "behavioral residue." The findings are just the latest in a series of recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. I, for one, support a woman's right to clean.
Got books from Karl Marx, you might be a socialist, if you got book from Nozick or Ayn Rand you might be a liberal.
I should have taken sociology courses instead.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
Felix Unger was a Conservative? Oscar Madison was a Liberal?
It seems to make sense to me, conservatives in my view have always been about protecting and preserving the America's physical assets and wealth, where as liberals conversely tend to put ideals above the nation's power and prosperity.
and just for the record in case it matters to anyone. I tend to view myself a somewhat left leaning moderate.
"I, for one, support a woman's right to clean."
In this era of overcharged political correctness, it's nice to see someone stand up in the face of it all and make a complete ass of themselves.
Conservatives are uptight motherfuckers. Liberals enjoy freedom.
the mess makes you!
Seriously though these kinds of analysis of political leaning toward behavior seem as silly as the easily startled tend to be more conservative.
How much of this do you folks in the Slashdot community out there really buy into?
ACK
The rest of the world dont use.
Trying to be social determinismts, you must use the most general and stereotypical easy deffinition, that's so broad contradictions don't got something to grab on.
On my course about writing papers, the lecturer warned us about using generalities.
This is beyond stupid.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
You know this is probably true because if you think about it, people leaning towards liberalism are more free spirited, going on vacation, listening to music, doing what makes them feel good, having the attitude of a college student, and whatever they have in their homes is going to reflect that. Conservatives are more about responsibility, working hard, living below your means, advancing your family, being proud of America, and what they put in their homes will also reflect that. In all this is an interesting study.
On reading the supposedly liberal traits, my first thought was "gay".
It's rather well known what types of people (straight, gay, single,
housewife, etc.) support various types of politics, and you can
trivially match that up with the given traits.
I am VERY liberal, indeed! LOL!
But it frightens me to realize that I am only a bookshelf and a bottle of Formula 409 away from being a neo-con!!!
'cause we've sure left a bit of a mess around. But at the same time we've put the mess places we can't see it, and made our own order where we can. Kinda reminds me of skeletons. In closets.
"Researchers found that the bedrooms and offices of liberals tend to be ... full of books about ... feminism."
Really now? I totally would have expected the conservatives to be into feminism.
I've always thought scientists are about telling me something I don't know.
A comedy genius is born.
Liberals love a mess? No wonder they love government...so much in common
Conservatives surround themselves with irons? :looks around:
C'mon, is my web cam on? Nobody I've ever known surrounds themselves with irons.
I've got a messy desk, though I try to keep it organized every few days, I've got music on my drive from Flowing Waters to ragas to Beethoven to Miles Davis to trash pop, all my books are on shelves unless I'm using them, and, yes, I have an alligator head from Louisiana nearby, as well as a Voltron, but my workspace is well-lit and I have some postage stamps in this desk's hutch. No flags or sports memorabilia are in sight.
I suspect that my mess's characteristics don't fit their model because the Liberal/Conservative single-political-dimension model is wildly oversimplistic. Trying to draw any conclusions based on it is just going to give you bad ideas.
In the real world most people would think I'm a conservative, though people who actually know me would think I'm a Classical Liberal. I know, I'm off-axis, for shame.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What does it mean if they're dimly lit and well decorated with drug paraphernalia?
It would get me exactly backwards! Sounds more like stereotyping than research.
After all, they say: "Order is for idiots, genius can handle chaos".
I know this is idle.. but i'd rather this crap stays in Digg or Reddit.
Did they ask five whole people from each party? Wow. (I know they asked more than that). The way TFA reads makes me think they hand picked their participants. I'm very conservative and my house is still a mess, we have art supplies everywhere, we like to travel, I like folk, classic rock, and modern rock. This study sounds too specifically biased towards perceived stereotypes. And blinking! Wow! I'm glad to know I'm more easily startled. I just love articles that make one group of people sound more human and personable than another group that would otherwise be exactly the same. Maybe I just need to be a more timid, anal-retentive Windows user (as opposed to an outgoing, artsy, Mac user).
I'm not a huge fan of idle, but if we're going to get random crap, it might as well be interesting, random crap. This story isn't too bad - I guess.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
This sounds like pop psychology to me. Is this journal an "A pub?" Is it even a high B? Funny how the description was spun to make leftists look vital and engaging, while conservatives are portrayed as pedestrian or even boorish.
I'm a staunch small-L Libertarian (which to leftists is indistinguishable from a conservative) and my home is usually quite neat and tidy. But in most other respects the description of a "liberal" abode matches mine. My home is filled with books, music, art, musical instruments, nice furniture, and two cats. I suspect that if one of the people behind this supposed study were to enter my home, they'd assume I was a leftist, at least until they started peering over the titles on my bookshelf.
I will say this however, the leftists where I work do tend to be the most messy, even slovenly in some cases.
The way I see it, the way that someone deals with the environment under their control says a lot about them. If someone can't even manage to keep their own space functional, then how can they handle the other aspects of life? People who take responsibility for themselves tend to embrace ideas derived from the concept of personal responsibility. People who avoid taking responsibility for themselves will embrace ideas that downplay or go against the concept of personal responsibility. So it isn't surprising that people who can't manage to take responsibility for their own living and working spaces would be most likely to embrace a philosophy that tells them they shouldn't have to.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I wonder if:
1. younger people tend to have messier rooms than older people (age correlates with political identity)
2. military people tend to be neater than non-military people
3. poorer people tend to be messier than richer people (again, correlation)
I'd like to see the actual report when it comes out to see which variables they're controlling for.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
This means that people with messy rooms can be targetted for voter intimidation! Just wait until they can work out your leanings from the way you dress, that'll be so much fun at polling stations.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
You know you will be justified in calling them a fascist
Someone tagged that with "correlationisnotcausation." Yeah. Great. Really insightful there. Clearly no claim of causation was made, but it's important to remind us of that bumper-sticker bit of wisdom. Anything else? Can we get a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag in there? Because really, something could ALWAYS unexpectedly go wrong. Maybe some more basic logic, like "adhominemattacksdontproveyourpoint?"
Yes, I promise you there are a lot more people looking for ways to call Obama an arab without actually calling him an arab. That's a dumber thing to research. There are people who are testing what is the best way to make large groups of schoolchildren believe in creationism, that's a dumber study. Nearly all market research provides us with more trivial insights into human nature than this. What colors make us want to buy laundry detergent is something that has far less impact than what makes us choose the course for the country.
The Obama Hope poster on the wall is also a dead giveaway that you're in a liberal's den.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
We could be discussing the discussion.
This space reserved for administrative use.
...don't clean house until after November 4. Please.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I guess this means I'm somewhere in the middle since my interests would indicate I'm a liberal but I have a tendency to want things neat and organized.
I have to say, it's quite obnoxious how utterly polarized politics has become in the US. It's basically all or nothing with too many people on both sides, to the point where a potentially sound idea is completely dismissed because it might have hints of being conservative or liberal. Instead of fixing existing systems too many people are intent on completely trashing it and replacing it with whatever conforms to their worldview. I don't even bother trying to discuss politics with some people I know because it results in them becoming openly hostile. They wont even take the time to consider my viewpoint and argue it. Instead I'm dismissed as a shill for one entity or another. The friends I do get into interesting discussions with are the ones who are legitimately moderate.
And this is amongst people who are somewhat informed, although some might draw all their news from one side of the aisle. Unfortunately, I encounter far too many people who don't know what the hell is going on beyond what they hear in sound bites. I find that overseas people seem to be better informed about politics. And their opinions seem to be more balanced. They seem inclined to side with parties based more on specific issues. And there's much less of this notion that one side has to take one stance on issues and the other side has to adopt the opposite stance.
What troubles me is that this is basically using science to reinforce stereotypes. Maybe someday someone will come along and tell us we can be cured of our political affiliations.
In complete opposition, one of my best friends, a fairly hardcore republican conservative, is the messiest person I know in life. Meanwhile, I am very liberal, independent and can't stand messes.
This article just blithely assumes personality traits are fixed at birth and then determine political beliefs, and makes essentially arbitrary value judgements on those traits.
Positive personality traits associated with liberalism (self-reliant, resilient, dominating and energetic) and negative ones attributed to conservatism (easily victimized or offended, indecisive, fearful and rigid) appear as young as nursery school-age kids--and correlate with those children's political beliefs in adulthood, according to a 20-year study published in 2006 in the Journal of Research in Personality. More recently, scientists linked the strength of a person's startle response to their political leanings: conservatives tended to scare easier, blinking harder than liberals when they heard a loud noise.
Now that thing about the startle response is interesting, especially because it's a simple enough trait that one can easily imagine it really is just genetics. On the other hand what's the point in describing personality traits as positive or negative here? Why not just say these traits were more common in liberals, and these over here were more common in conservatives? What purpose is served by mixing value judgements in with the attempted science like that? What kind of messed-up person describes 'dominating' as a positive trait in a political context, anyway?
what about the library of congress?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
And that must be the result of being Libertarian!
I don't want Obama, I have convinced myself he is a socialist, which is fine, but I don't want that.
Errrrr, *gosh*, I don't really want McCain either. He's (R) but not a conservative. I'd trust his foreign policy, but his domestic policy would be some smarmy mish-mash of capitalist and socialist ideas that would get all fubar and result in just as much misery as I think Obama domestic policy would.
I learned much too late that I really, really, liked Ron Paul. *snuffed*
So now I'm thinking, Bob Barr? He seems like a reasonable second to Ron Paul, but I don't know if I care for his VP. I'd honestly rather have Palin in there.
Slashdot and Digg and all the high-tech Web 2.0 destinations are vibrant with Obama supporters, God love 'em. I wonder why these communities are so tilted that way?
To those folks, I'm still seeking an answer to a problem which has been troubling me throughout the campaign: All the nations' leaders who are in an adversarial relationship with us have publicly and openly voiced support for Obama, and continue to wish him well for the election. Is it possible to despise tyrants like Amadinejad and Chavez, but still root for an Obama victory alongside them? I keep asking myself what it is about Obama that makes dictators such as they want to give him their support? If Amadinejad comes to our United States and condemns the life all we Americans have worked so hard for (for generations) in front of the UN, and then proceeds to encourage us to vote for Obama, what exactly is the "change" which he's expecting to get? I am frightened at the prospect that in Obama, people like Mamoud and Hugo see someone whose governing policy is more aligned with theirs, and would push America in the directions which Iran and Venezuela have gone.
I think most of our fine and earnest citizens of Iranian and Venezuelan heritage would say that such an alignment and transformation would be a terrible thing, and would be in keeping with the values and opportunities which motivated them to come here and become fellow Americans (please speak up and don't let me speak for you).
I'm fiscally conservative, and socially libertarian. I don't approve of the actions our gov't has taken with respect to creating this crisis, or the actions now purported to try to solve it. Free markets and deregulation were not to blame, because the market was not free to start with. Subsidy distorted it and disconnected, for the financial segment, the risk-reward relationship of a naturally free, open, and transparent market. Mostly Dems inflated subsidy, and mostly Repubs removed "select" regulations and clouded transparency. Both types of manipulation are contra to a free market. Hopefully the damage will end up being minimal, but we are eerily following in lock-step with the fiscal and social game plans which took a devastating, but short-lived stock market downturn, and transformed it into a crushing depression.
I believe that as an American, you are free to do what you will in your own private life. Whatever lifestyle you choose. Tempered with personal responsibility and respect for your neighbors.
Freedom doesn't mean free-for-all, which is an ironic sort of tyranny in itself. The highest degrees of freedom carry also the highest responsibilities. I want the freedom to act in my own self-interests, and I accept the responsibility to do right by my neighbors when decided when, where, and how to enjoy any particular freedom. But I want it to be my choice.
Our modern popular culture I think realizes the responsibilities necessary to grab hold of, but increasingly does not want to shoulder its burdens. The rationalization is that less true freedom may not feel soo great, but abdicating the burden of responsibility more than makes up for that loss. That kind of carefree "feels" better. Or, so such the culture believes.
My wager, is that such is a fools bargain. Carefree != freedom. Is there a harm in trying it? Yes, I believe there is,
USNG: 14TPU4605
... because I don't fit their liberal living-space profile at all! Not even remotely. And I'm not even remotely conservative (I ridicule and despise tradition and ceremony for the sakes of themselves).
They should have included me in their little study. I would have been the fly in the statistical ointment.
does that mean most black people are messy?
at least those other studies were well done
this one is just propaganda.
I don't know about you, but...
did it take a researcher to discover this. Of course liberals are more open minded and love travel, ethnic foods and are bit messy. That's because their behaviour and thinking multitask, it doesn't mean they are dis-organized, it just means they have a lot to think about and not enough time to organize themselves, that's why they hire a conservative to that for them.
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I'm a liberal. My rooms are always a mess. But you know I like guns. Which is why I line them all up neatly around my dorm room walls. And I make sure to use them each for their intended purpose - barrett m500 for bears and other large game, my glock for passing squirrels, and the 30 ot 6 for lawyers. seriously people, It's just the future of America we're dealing with. You guys need to lighten up. I think if we all took a step back and realized how absurd it is we're all alive, the election would seem like a trivial thing. I mean hell, the president can't even write a bill of his own. The election in 2006 was much more important than this one. The parallels to Zaphod are disturbing. Oh, and just in case no one has broken it yet: Hitler. However, the rules are puff puff pass. Republicans, you gotta follow the rules. We'll give it back when the economy is back together and all the ridiculous legislation we put in place to try and speed that up starts to get on everyone's nerves.
I never knew that about myself. I must be one of the most extreme radicals I've ever met. Nevermind what I _believe_, nevermind that I'd have voted for Dan Quayle for President if he ever got the nomination, I must be a liberal, because my room and desk are extremely messy!
Either that, or there's a sociologist somewhere with entirely too much time on his hands.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Sorry, I just had too.
"Conservatives tend to be neat and liberals love a mess"
They say the opposite in the original article ..
Because of this mistake, I guess the author of the post is conservative whereas I'm a liberal, right ?
What fool tagged this with correlationisnotcausation? TFA and TFS don't suggest that messiness, or lack therefore, *causes* political views, only that they can predict it!
I think a lot of people probably realise that the words "liberal" and "conservative" are rather simplistic labels and don't adequately express their views. The problem is knowing which words to use instead.
This website proposes a two dimension system (Left to Right, and Libertarian to Authoritarian). You can answer a series of questions to see where your ideals fit onto these axes, and there are some really interesting charts showing where various politicians and other famous and infamous people fit.
See http://www.politicalcompass.org/, read the introduction and click the "Take the test" link.
There's a page on the US Presidential Election 2008, here: http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008
maybe I should do a study to figure out whether they are morons or not.
So my bedroom is a mess, but I'm voting for McCain. I must be an anomaly.
I'm a total messy. My desk is cluttered at best and a complete disaster area when I've let it go for longer than a month without a tidy. The rest of my living space is much the same. To others it looks like a tornado hit a trailer park but to me it's quite functional. I'm all about function before form and I care more about how the space works for me, than how it looks to visitors. My kitchen is the exception to my mess as it's spotless and has nice clean open spaces in which to cook.
I'm a Lib that used to be a Repub. I have pretty much nothing on my walls these days and don't have any of the stuff mentioned in the article that would denote one part or the other, not in sufficient quality to be relevant to my political leanings anyway. But then again, as a Lib, I guess my setup really does reflect my leanings.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
So is it safe to say that in most of the western world outside of the US there are no tidy rooms? Would I find myself struck with culture shock if I traveled north to Canada and witnessed the disarray of most the homes and the bright colors? Let me make a note to stay far away from France and Germany as I'm likely to be buried in an avalanche of travel brochures. Have these researchers ever spent anytime in the deep south? I don't think I'd consider stacks of old cars in your front yard as tidy (though they are stacked!), but I bet they'll be voting Republican this November. The whole study seems to be looking for some stereotypical visual indicators where they probably only appear in a vocal minority. PS I'm a messy libertarian and my wife is a very neat liberal
This isn't even stereotyping. This is a completely unsubstantiated supposition come from watching too much TV and not enough actual meeting any of these people they're talking about. I doubt if this person has ever seen the inside of a bedroom other then their own.
Then apparently I firmly believe in the Chaos Theory of Everything, my political gauge is probably a mobius strip, I really wish Escher had designed the US capital building, and marshmallow fluff can be used to fix the economy.
My soon-to-be wife simply calls me a slob with a few obsessive-compulsive attributes thrown in.
* looks around his place *
I guess I'm Che Guevara.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This study is so main-party biased! Let's not forget our friends in the Social and Green parties:
Socialists tend to decorate their apartment with poor relatives and lack locked doors between rooms. The resources are mostly shared, but scarce, and there is always a babysitter available in the next room.
Green Party members can be identified by their vertical wall gardens and dirt floors (renewable, warm in winter, cool in summer!). Their furniture is a mishmash of roadside finds and is mostly used to hold the photovoltaic cells that power their house into semi-brightness after dark. There is only one room because any more would be wasteful.
Anyone want to tackle the Labour, Communist and Independants?
What if my books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia, are neatly stowed away in a well lit room?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Like many other research, this is just an example of someone who has a belief and only uses examples that support that belief to justify that belief, while ignoring everything else.
Bullshit at its best:
It sounds good because it contains a lot cliché -- but its simply not true.
There are a lot conservatives hiding their messy rooms, there are a lot of so called liberals who have a nearly fascistic tidiness.
Even if you could assume a tendency, in the individual case you can't look into someone's room and say something about its denizen.
So the result is totally worthless in everyday life.
But I'm afraid even the so called intellectuals will fall into the trap again. We don't need any more statements about groups that don't occur in the daily grind.
Ok, if you run a hotel you should make a liberal party congress pay more, because they tend to leave their rooms a bit more messy! What else did we learn?
Stop spreading bullshit!
Liberals don't believe in "personal" space. It all belongs to everyone. Therefore it is the government's job to keep that area in proper order.
Any article like this can be easily dismissed like this: There is no definitive way to divide a group into "liberals" and "conservatives". There are too many orthogonal attributes to measure when trying to explain political ideologies.
One way that's still simple but vastly superior is to define a two dimensional graph with fiscal conservative on the right and fiscal liberal on the right. Also put social conservative and social liberal on opposite ends of the vertical axis. You might do a step better and find a way to say it without the words "conservative" or "liberal".
This is why the United States should have at least four parties. Right now you have to choose between two and you may have to give up something you like, say fiscal conservatism, because you value social liberalism even more (not that either party is made up of fiscal conservatives).
my wife is a neat freak and a raging liberal.
I'm extremely cluttered and a moderate.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Actually, the US, a liberal will determine that since you were driving a new SUV that you must not care about the environment or poor people or education or world peace or health care or racism or women's rights, etc, etc. The liberal will take down your license plate number, find out were you live, create a community activist organization that promotes the above listed ideals while ensuring that you are associated with being against the ideals without ever considering facts. The liberal will encourage the passage of repressive laws that result in more government regulations to ensure that you never have a chance to get lost in your SUV because the law won't allow it.
Say's Obama to Joe the plumber "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." ...that's a liberal... if you earn it the government will spread it...as in bend over and spread.
Since my house looks like a tornado just struck. My wife and I used to clean up our kids' toys, but they would just scatter them around again so we stopped. (One is 5 so he could learn to clean up, but the other is only 17 months and won't know what "clean up" is for awhile.)
Then there's the dining room table that seems to be a magnet for miscellaneous junk. Old mail, my son's drawings, magazines, etc, all wind up there. Eventually, we clean it up, but it doesn't last.
The kitchen is no better. I try to stay on top of it but we don't have enough cabinet space. The cabinets wind up overflowing onto the counters and canvas bags (to avoid the paper/plastic decision) litter the ground.
We would love to clean up but working and taking care of two little ones leaves us tired at the end of the day. Once both boys are asleep, we have about 2 hours at most before we turn in. It is hard to do all of the cleaning (as well as all other household chores) during that time.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Conservatives have less cluttered workspaces as they probably see cleaning as below them and employed someone under minimum wage to clean up for them instead.
Funny, because most of the people I know or come across, including myself, tend to be just the opposite. The clean, anal retentive types, dot every i and cross every T, "that goes over THERE!" types tend to be liberals, while the free for all, throw the clothes on the chair, with 5 shelves full of computer crap I just put there without rhyme or reason ones (like me) tend to lean towards conservatism. As others said, sounds like stereotyping, not scientific research and more like a hunch they tried to make into something more than it was. Did it also say that dark haired folk tend to be smarter and Blonds have more fun too?
Stupid, stupid.
How do these people get funding?
Just in general elections:
You earn less than $100,000/year: your vote doesn't count anyway. You go with whoever makes you feel better or has better lies to tell.
$100,000-250,000: Most likely you are in a business that makes use of the freedom-limiting laws like DMCA: Democrat
$250,000 and above: You're rich and you like the tax breaks you get on the backs of the lower-earning folks: Republican
Or another overview for THIS election:
Your IQ 120:
Democrat
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It seems to me that you would need larger samples in more life/professional areas to draw reasonable conclusions. Could the tendency to be more or less organized also be attributable to one's profession or current life circumstance?
My room is full of trinkets and mementos, three guitars, a set of congas, clutter, and colorful trinkets from friends in other countries, and colorful gifts from friends who have traveled where I have not had the opportunity to go. You'll find evidence of my hobby of dabbling in foreign languages. You won't find a single American flag, sport poster, or banner, yet the majority of my political views are squarely conservative. While it is an interesting topic of study, the sample will need to be much larger, and the demographic divisors much more granular, before onclusions may be extended to the general population.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I just call you American Libertarians "Randians" - that's the one common theme I can't seem to ignore. Do you, or do you not, own a copy of Atlas Shrugged? It's like the Communist Manifesto for American Libertarians.
I use the term "Randians", cause in the rest of the world Libertarianism is left anarchism...
Maybe Objectivists would be a nicer term.
I'm so glad political views have been reduced to house clutter. I thought we had bottomed out, but I was so, so wrong.
Liberals are "messy" as they say because they don't feel constrained by boundries, old social taboos based on archaic religions, and feel there exists an ideal future that can be reached for where everyone is equal and free and personkind cna evolve socially out of our tribalism and medieval mentality..
Of course, the way to achieve this enlightenment is to create a totalitarian single-party government that controls all aspects of personkind's lives and is economically fascist. When the freedoms have been attained there will, of course, no longer be need for such a governmental system and those in control of it will naturally give up power.
I'm a satanic clam.
You know you will be justified in calling them a fascist
The implication here being that Fascism arises from the Right. Unfortunately, all the real rights-infringing jack-boot legislation in the past 20 years seems to be coming from the Left: Laws dictating where you can smoke, what you can eat, what cars you can drive, which guns you can buy, what media you can record on which devices, etc. all seem to emanate from the Nanny-State Entertainment-Lobby First-Church-Of-Gaia Left Wingnuts. The Right Wing rights infringement has been pretty much beaten down, due in no small part to the derision it has experienced in the media.
My living room is liberal and my home office is conservative!!!
No, actually, he didn't. The law you ignorantly attribute to him was handed down from three congressmen, three REPUBLICAN congressmen, while the REPUBLICANS held a super-majority in congress meaning the president's veto power is null.
Get your facts straight numbnuts, you are giving the smart conservatives a bad name.
<disclaimer>I am a republican.</disclaimer>
This article paints republicans as being stupid. Books and art are replaced with flags and calendars, and neither I nor any of my friends have calendars or flags on the wall in our house. Sounds like the researchers have an agenda of poisoning culture to view us as simple.
FTA: "It's pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete," says Carney. "Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one's environment is predictable and therefore safe."
Who wants to bet that the person who made that comment is a messy liberal? "Liberals like thinking"? Even if there is a strong correlation here, how does having more books mean you like thinking more. Maybe "liberals like reading" would have made more sense. Then they go on to make being neat sound bad -- like it's some obsessive need based on insecurity. As for myself, I'm a very messy conservative who reads a lot and likes art.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
So physically, I am a liberal.
But electronically, I am a conservative?
Or maybe I just don't like to get out of my chair to file stuff?
I also like pancakes. What does that make me?
My passionately liberal friends keep a very clean house.
My passionately conservative friends house is stark it is so clean and organized.
My conservative girlfriend's house used to be extremely neat but her newest job leaves her tired all the time and the house has suffered (getting her a roomba).
I am libertarian (fiscally conservative and socially liberal unlike modern "conservatives" who are socially conservative, pro-wealthy, and fiscally irresponsible). My house is frequently a wreck- but the roomba has helped me a ton.
I am not seeing a strong correlation but I do see some correlation.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Given that most recent studies have determined conservatives to be coward, violent and unadaptable as well as uncaring, and even kind of stupid, being messy doesn't seem that bad in comparison.
But... the future refused to change.
The anarchist shoots first and asks questions later. Libertarians accept that there are legitimate functions for government, including police and courts.
I'll shoot anyone who doesn't draw this distinction.
next time your mother asks you to tidy your basement
There, fixed that for ya.
Why would anyone care or want to know about someone's housekeeping habits?
One thing is for sure, Federal dollars are at work here.
What site is this? 250+ comments and nobody has mentioned the Mac==Liberal, PC==Conservative stereotype??
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Oh crap! I'm political?!
We used an interesting system here in London to pick our mayor: Your ballot has two columns - your first choice and your second choice. You can't vote for the same person in both.
The idea is that the votes from everyone's first column are totalled up. If nobody gets more than 50% of the vote, they eliminate all but the top two candidates. They then add to each candidate's total all of the votes for that candidate in the second column. The winner is the one with the highest total from both columns combined.
In practice what this means is that you vote in column 1 for the candidate you'd really prefer, even if he has no chance of winning. You vote in the column 2 for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning and whom you don't mind too much.
Applied to the national elections in America, it would mean that the greens could all vote for Nader safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't result in a "lost vote" for the Democrats. And libertarians could vote for Paul.
The beauty of such a system is that the final result would be a better reflection of the electorate's will (Gore would have won, for instance), and the true extent of minority candidates' support would also be more obvious, so those candidates would have a bigger influence on the election - for instance, they might not fall foul of the 15% "viability" standard required to participate in the debates. And in the long run, it's just possible that a third party might break the stranglehold of the Dems and Reps.
Am I crazy, or is this idea worth exploring in America?
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
This really scares me ..."Researchers found that the bedrooms and offices of liberals tend to be colorful and full of books about travel, ethnicity, feminism"
Just what we need, a bunch of liberal men reading books on feminism...
Me (libertarian), and my family (all Republicans), keep very very very messy living spaces. Our rooms are, in general, decorated with dirty laundry, dirty dishes, computers, beds, dressers and occasionally curtains (sometimes windows accompanying these). We have racks and racks of books about various mechanical devices, several complete sets of various encyclopedias and religious books (along with various other fictional works). (In my own home, .. I have a kindle.)
So uh, no. I don't think this is even a little true, at least not in my experience. My only liberal relative keeps the cleanest house in the (hundreds strong) family.
This is total BS I've seen people from both spectrums fit either side. I find it funny that the researchers leave out the alternatives. What about the people that think the neo-cons of the Republicans and the neo-socialist of the Democrats are all just power hungry whores that want to screw up this country with their asinine new world order ideology? We are probably just put in the social outcast section of the clean and dirty rooms.
Totally and 100% BS on both your post and the one that started this thread.
The writers of the studies are projecting their own biases.
It would be a great idea to explore (2nd choice, Instant Runoff, etc). But the system was rigged (maybe not rigged, but it certainly works out that way) to be a 2 party system a long time ago. Try convincing the 2 controlling parties who have something to lose that this would be a good idea.
Maybe this explains why I usually don't bother voting.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Did they even try? My conversative roommate and best friend at home both have rooms just as messy as mine. And my liberal boyfriend keeps his room compulsively clean.
and Obama and Clinton are the reason why people think words mean the same definition that they were previously. They continually associate jest with politics, yet they are never held liable when the public is converted into a private implement of those policies and fails miserably to the point that none know the difference between private and public. Does anyone forget that United States for purposes in Title 27 3002 15(b) still means "a federal corporation", and is singular United States not plural?
Get the first english dictionary published in common law on this continent, and compare the original words with those original documents, and you'll find Bush and all the turkey jockies are no different than those they allegedly "overcame" in office. Huh, since Clintons touched everything, I don't think I can say "overcame" without laughing at Jeff Gannon's midnite raunch in the bedroom with George and Laura no doubt.
Lynch all those Illuminatic freemasons and pick a libertarian that isn't member to The Libertarian Party(r).
I am conservative and have a flag motive in my office....how funny! And the heck with you messy marvin's ....I like it neat so I can find things.
People tend to use the liberal, convervative labels too broadly IMO. Most of us vary depending on the issue I'd say. Maybe your socially liberal but fiscally conservative. You're pro-choice but against gay marriage. Hopefully we are all more complex and thoughtful than a simplistic liberal/conservative label. However I've noticed that if someone is indeed across the board conservative or across the board liberal they tend to be pretty close-minded an impervious to rational argument.
Having actually read the researcher's book(Snoop, and that is not an affiliate link, so click away.), I'd like to point out a thing or two that make me think this area of study is worthwhile:
Say you're interviewing someone. You'd like to know if the person would make a good employee or not, or at the very least try to figure out what sort of employee you could expect. So, these researchers studied interviews by having interviewers rate people based on what they saw. Interviewees who spent more time talking, who gestured a lot, and who dressed more formally were judged to be higher on both social skills and work motivation.
However, when they looked at what these people were actually like, talking, gesturing, and dress were indeed valid cues for social skills, but only the formality of dress predicted the applicant's work motivation.
Most of that was from pages 169 and 170 in the book.
Now, if you're interviewing for a position, wouldn't it be nice to have some sort of guide as to where our senses tend to be accurate, and where they tend to lead us astray? As an interviewee, wouldn't it be nice to know how people are likely to respond to you if you act in a certain way? Is it really better to assume that, since we'll never be 100% certain about what one thing or another means, we shouldn't study it at all?
Seeing sports posters up on the wall, or an American flag in a certain area can lead you to ask certain questions that you might not think to ask otherwise. It's not an open invitation to pigeon-hole and dismiss a person.
Now that's a trememdous advance to reinvent T.W.Adorno's "f-scale" using blinking velocity, the brain structures and DNA instead of oedipian complexes, libido and aggression. He described the very same thing in his "The Authoritarian Personality" some fifty years ago, but that was psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis is passe. Enter neurology, enter genetics to fill the vacuum outside of orthodox materialism. That's how social sciences work.
This shows you that the researchers successfully conned (by cheating) their way through college psychology courses (if they even went to college) because they're too stupid to understand the dichotomy between nature and nurture.
Here's an example. I had a female friend who was raised a pagan (really, even in these times), her mom was a hippie, she liked to weave hemp, give massages, was struggling to accept that she was a sadist, and guess what. She hated anything right wing that had even an inkling of conservative sprinkled on top.
Then, later in life, I dated a girl. She is in school to become a nurse, she likes to watch Fox News because that's what her family likes, she indiscriminately uses the word beaner (all her friends are white and from her church), and when sharing stories about international cultures (because I like to talk about other cultures/countries/peoples) all her stories are related to ones she heard from family friends that used to be missionaries in [place said third world country here]. Guess what, SHE WAS A RAGING CONVERVATIVE!
Go figure huh. I even took it upon myself to study the church girl more closely (before she realized her inability to hold back around me and the church guilt it was causing her), and she was no different from most other white girls I've dated (except she uses cocoa butter instead of regular lotion), except she was more innocent, less corrupted, nicer, and more ignorant of the ways of the world.
Here here.
USNG: 14TPU4605
I know many liberals that are obsessively neat and conservatives that are quite messy. However, the notion that liberal and conservative are even that distinct anymore is questionable. In a fiscal sense, there are true conservatives in office anymore- as one of our most "conservative" presidents, George W. Bush has made the largest spending increase in history and racked up the largest deficit in history. Spending wildly while cutting taxes is not conservative. Likewise, social conservatives are no better than big government liberals with their push for government intrusion into people's personal lives.