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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.
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.
Since when does a space have to be neat to be functional? I find neat and tidy spaces rather oppressively sterile and unliveable, whereas my messy spaces are comfortable and eminently functional. For what it's worth, I'd call myself libertarian too, but would be even more swift to distance myself from conservatives than from leftists.
Libertarianism virtually doesn't exist outside of the United States. 'Left anarchism' isn't libertarianism as it's most widely understood and defined. Just because a cat wears a label that says it's a dog, doesn't make it a dog.
I also find it hilarious how people conflate libertarianism and Objectivism. Ayn Rand hated libertarians, primarily because she made the same mistake that everybody and their dog makes about libertarianism: she failed to realize that it's not a philosophy. Libertarianism is and should be a simple system of government that only deals with matters of harm (physical or financial) between persons. It doesn't make value judgments about actions outside of that spectrum, because it's not the role of a libertarian government to say whether it is better or worse for an individual to devote their lives to curing cancer or jerking off to porn. Because libertarianism wouldn't take any kind of stand on what man should do (only what man shouldn't do), Ayn Rand thought it was a weak and spineless philosophy, consequently missing the point that it wasn't a philosophy in the first place.
As highly as I think of Ayn Rand, she basically doomed Objectivism when she said that anybody who didn't believe exactly as she did couldn't call themselves an Objectivist. (This is not hypocrisy in the context of my first paragraph. There are reasonable and unreasonable degrees of interpretive difference. Lutherans and Baptists have interpretive differences but they're both Christian. A muslim couldn't reasonably call himself a Christian even if he argued about the role Christ has in the Quran. It's a subjective matter of symantics to some extent.) Particularly ironic and inconsistent considering that she herself wrote about the value of evolving philosophies and the fallacy of the pursuit much less the attainment of perfection. This has resulted in stagnancy by design.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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. --