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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.
Ayn Rand is one for the liberals how?
Libertarian, sure. But liberal... not so much.
What does it mean if they're dimly lit and well decorated with drug paraphernalia?
As opposed to your boy hero who just nationalized the banks.
All sides have dirty hands in that, from the very beginning.
This meltdown has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans failing us. It has to do with the black-box government as a whole failing us.
Perhaps our representatives could, at some point, get back to the job of representing us.
It would get me exactly backwards! Sounds more like stereotyping than research.
You know you will be justified in calling them a fascist
If someone redefines another term in this topic my head is going to explode.
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.
I think it's ignorant and rude for you to suggest that liberals don't work as hard as conservatives, or don't love America as much. How do you know how hard I work? And how can you possibly see into my heart and tell me how much I love America? The fact is, you're simply spouting stereotypes that reflect your political bias.
And as to the spending, Bush had a republican congress for most of his reign, and they managed to get our government and our country into a pretty deep financial hole. Living below your means? What a joke.
You've seen the current national debt, right?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The current, widely accepted IN THE US use. In the UK, it still retains much of it original meaning.
The distinction that I came across between liberals and libertarians, which I think has some value, is that the liberal, while believing in personal freedom, also believes in social constructs, whereas the libertarian believes in rugged individuality. So a libertarian shoots trespassers on his first land and asks questions later, whereas a liberal checks if they are lost, ill, or some other socially acceptable reason, and only shoots when they are proved to be aggressors. The libertarian accepts that he will occasionally kil the innocent, the liberal that he will occasionally be to slow and get hurt himself.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
>>>... and if you got no books at all, you might just be Republican :)
You know I'm sick of these prejudices (yes that is the correct word). I'm a Republican, I read lots of texts, and my room is about as messy & colorful as any liberal room.
Furthermore, I'm sick of the label "conservative". The idea that man should rule himself (not be ruled by politicians) is about as liberal as can be. I support legalization of marijuana (inside your own home) and same-sex marriages (it's your bedroom; do whatever you want). I'm as liberal as any Democrat, I just don't think having my government act like my daddy is the answer.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
If someone redefines another term in this topic my head is going to explode
It depends on what the definition of *IS* is.......
I'm sick of you people misappropriating the word 'liberal'.
No. Replace "trespassers" with "entering my house". I don't know any libertarians which shoot before determining the actions are malicious. You do them a disservice to say they're too stupid to think about their actions. Even the guy in Texas waited at least 5 minutes before being absolutely sure they were robbing his neighbors house.
The liberal, will not be able to shoot because the "common sense gun control" laws (what a doublespeak term that is, ha) he voted for have removed his right to own a gun for self defense (only for shooting animals!).
Two Englishmen got drunk in Texas, got lost and walked up the path to a front door to ask the way - at 2am. The owner shot them dead without asking questions. He was acquitted in court. About five years ago.
In the UK, "liberal" does not equal gun control. Many UK liberals also want gun control, but in your parlance the two are not the same, which is my point. On the contrary, a true liberal wants the freedom to have guns - balanced by the requirement to keep your guns safe. It is US parlance that a liberal is one who restricts the freedom to own guns.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Here's the problem, sir: you're using the old definition of Republican. The party doesn't stand for that anymore.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
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...
The Republican party hasn't stood for your values in decades. The size of government balloons under Republican administrations, they spend money like there's no tomorrow, they push through draconian legislation like the PATRIOT Act, and they don't support legalization of marijuana or same-sex marriages. Why do you continue to identify yourself as a Republican when it's obvious that they don't stand for anything you believe in?
Why would I switch to Democrat when *they* don't stand for anything I believe either?
They talk about freedom, and yet they want to add even more taxes to my paycheck. I'm already losing 40% of my pay in automatic deductions. We don't need more taxes.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Guess what? You probably shouldn't be a Republican.
Just about the only thing that Republicans will do that you approve of, is cut taxes. They've shown they won't cut spending to match either so it's inevitable that that bill has to come due and taxes will rise even higher than they were before they were cut. You just might want to vote differently.
And to answer the follow up, people aren't prejudiced against Republicans. They're upset with the behaviour of Republican Politicians, Republican Pundits, the Republican Party and the voters who seem to excuse any amount of insanity as long as it comes with tax cuts.
Personally, I want my government to be based on reason and best practices, not faith and war and that's why I can't vote for the current Republican party. And if you're an objectivist, you just might want to think a little more closely about what steps are actually a good idea to get better government (even if better for you is only less) and which are not. "Starving the Beast" isn't working.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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. --
They talk about freedom, and yet they want to add even more taxes to my paycheck. I'm already losing 40% of my pay in automatic deductions. We don't need more taxes.
Why do you believe that "freedom" must mean "less taxes".