Slashdot Mirror
Is "Left" Vs. "Right" Hard-coded Into Your Brain?
New submitter kyjellyfish writes "Research published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that your parents 'Left
or 'Right' party affiliations are not the only factor at work shaping a person's political identity. Differences in opinion between 'Lefties' and 'Righties' may reflect specific physiological processes. In research performed over 10 years ago, brain scans showed that London cab drivers' gray matter grew larger to help them store a mental map of the city."
From the article: "Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli."
So how does this work in a traditionally free country like America...
Please stop. You're suggesting that the brains from one country are somehow different from that of another country. If we change 'country' out for 'race', it should be painfully obvious what the problem here is.
American conservatives are afraid to place their fates into the hands of the elected experts on human happiness.
You really shouldn't comment on the complex political landscape of another country whose citizens you apparently have little regular contact with. It makes you look like an idiot. No, "american" conservatives are just like "british" conservatives which are just like "african" conservatives, which are just like every conservative. Ever. The definition of conservativism doesn't change because of the country you're in. Perhaps its expression does, but the study here isn't about expression, but reaction. In that, conservatives broadly and as an aggregate group, are simply risk-averse. And because of how the human mind operates, an unknown risk is almost always subjectively larger in a person's mind than a known one. This is why we spent trillions of dollars combatting terrorism (an unknown risk) while both retrospectively and at the time, it could have easily been shown that a known risk (drunk driving) costs far more lives.
To extrapolate from a specific behavior (risk aversion) a complete political ideology is... at best... dubious.
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Well, at least the way I hear it used on the news, American conservatives are very different from Chinese and Russian conservatives. American, Chinese, and Russian conservatives do have something in common - they want to preserve the status quo or even revert in some ways to how things were before. But "how things were before" is very different depending on the country. For an American conservative, the desire is to return to a time of less government intrusion in people's lives. For Chinese and Russian conservatives the desire is to return to a time of much greater government intrusion into people's lives.
Islamic conservatives provide another example of "conservative" that is very different from an American conservative (and actually pretty different from an American liberal too). Although I suppose if you really look at some of the societies the Islamic conservatives are actually very conservative because they are attempting to change (or have recently changed) their countries to be very different from what they were before. For example, women in Iran and Egypt used to walk around with their heads uncovered, now the so-called "conservatives" have forced them to start covering their hair or face harassment.
An American conservatives my be similar to a British conservative - I don't follow British politics much so I can't say for sure, but an American conservatives is very different from many conservatives throughout the world.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
It's not that SF is really all that extreme, it's that its politics are so far left that the place is run like a circus.
Special interest groups run the city.
They make ill-informed 'green' decisions which have drastic negative reprecussions for the city, resulting in 3rd world like conditions (see: their sanitary system - google 'why does san francisco always smell like shit')
They do asinine things to the flow of traffic and eliminate parking spots to 'penalize' people for driving, such as removing lanes and parking spaces. Net result: everyone suffers, and driving in the city just becomes more difficult.
Public transit, the liberal dream, is only given lip service, in so far as it serves the city to milk it for funding and claim they've got a good public transit system. (NYC MTA puts these chumps to shame.)
They 'patch' roadways with steel, not even diamond pattern steel. They do this in San Francisco, one of the dirtiest, grimiest cities in the US. Want to guess what happens to that steel when it rains?
I got modded down, significantly, for the GP post. Why? Because they didn't like what I had to say, not that there was anything actually factual with what I said.
Where a city like NYC would have built a dozen bridges and/or tunnels to deal with traffic demand, San Francisco does.... nothing. Or rather, they shut down an existing bridge so they can widen it.
San Francisco is a "one party" city. (Hopefully I don't have to explain why a single party environment is bad for accountability; the expected corruption from such an environment is quite evident.)
The city doesn't really need a reason to raise taxes. They just do, and you better hope you aren't an actual property owner or you'll likely be hurt by it.
SF area people are more in favor of illegal immigrants than they are people from "flyover country". Racial and cultural ad hominem will abound for the people who they disagree with - their fellow countrymen.
They elected Nancy Pelosi. Multiple times. This is the woman who has abused federal coffers excessively (eg. demanding Air Force planes to fly her around and frequently back/forth to SF from DC). Her voting record aside, she's one of the 'entitled' members of Congress who think they're better than the rest, and act accordingly.
The populace takes pride in hedonistic displays as a whole, with multiple city-wide festivals per year.
I've never visited or worked anywhere in the US where people seem so incredibly lazy.
Pick a view, any view, and hold it: it's valid, accepted, and celebrated, as long as it's not traditional Christianity or a conservative American lifestyle.
Whereas in somewhere like NYC, you can have some guy tell you to go fuck yourself and then pick up a conversation with the person 5 minutes later in a line about the weather, in San Francisco someone's liable to throw paint on you for wearing the wrong style or generally be confrontational and hostile for no apparent reason. Even the homeless/beggars are obnoxious and in your face.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The average american, and average slashdot poster is CLUELESS about politics.
As opposed to the average citizen of any other country? Why is it necessary to hold the average american up to some special standard?
Reality is the average american is too ignorant/stupid to have any kind of informed political view of america given the huge amount of propaganda that pervades their media and education system.
Reality is... every first world country has a government with a bureaucratic process so dense as to blunt, if not entirely dissipate, any creative process for change. You say they're ignorant and stupid, but that's an ignorant and stupid attitude. The truth is, most people aren't interested in politics because its emotionally painful if one becomes overly-involved. That's not an unintelligent response to a hopelessly and needlessly complex system designed specifically to be resistant to intelligent and thoughtful discourse.
You simply picked the one with the largest military and economy in the world to shit on, for no other reason than because you want to pull it down for your own emotional gratification. How you managed to get this to be labelled "+5 insightful" is simply saying that a great many people also have such emotional needs... but having offered no proof or objective analysis, "insightful" is not the word I would use to describe your reaction. But then, there is no "+5, I Agree Because I Have Emotional Needs That Depend On Crapping On Others" option.
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