Posted on 09/26/2012 10:30:38 PM PDT by neverdem
Don’t the progs have to have a brain to participate?
heehee!
.
Well, it should be clear where the liberal, homo segment checks in here............
As has been said many times, calling it homo"phobia" is flat out wrong, when it is a disgust with their behavior that is the core of the rejection.
“In the more recent study, researchers discovered a greater volume of gray matter in two areas of the brain for subjects reporting conservative attitudes. “
Yep, just like I said recently, the human race is actually experiencing a true evolutionary split that will separate us into two distinct groups, one conservative and the other liberal. And you said that the conservatives will be the dominate species, and the one most likely to survive and thrive, because so many of us, in general, are fiercely independent and are resourceful and creative. Well, we may have been joking about all of this at the time, but there is actually science to support our wild speculation.
What about people who switch sides?
How do they determine what’s liberal and what’s conservative, anyway? I’ve never been sure.
“ideology is learned or imprinted onto a blank slate”
BS.
The “core foundations” and supposedly “higher moral faculties” are very vague. So are the ideological identifications, of course. But I wonder how they propose to turn “individualizing” and “binding” scientifically into ideological tags. Except by asking the subjects. But what do young people know about themselves? I suppose it doesn’t matter, since whatever they say matches up in an objective pattern with the brainscans and the foundations/faculties, no matter what we call them.
I just wonder what substance there is to thinking such vagueries can determine abstract questions like how big a problem is the deficit or ought we to go to war over Iranian nukes. Obviously the parties are cut generally along sentimental lines. And philosophically on the whole conservatives I’ve always thought were more individualistic and liberals collectivist. Unless you’re talking about sec and drugs on the one side and national defense on the other.
Psychology and neuroscience are closely enough related. Of course the former is a pretender. Sociology is linked to the former but not the latter. Political science has become a philosophy/sociology hybrid. Here you have neuroscience making claims on philosophy when it’s four times removed. All it can really say is kids who claim to be so-and-so share like brains, and their brains match up with states we’ve given pretentious emotional names. Amidst admissions that it’s all more complicated than we’ll ever know materialism continues it’s long campaign to conquer all.
Thought is determined by matter and environment. That’s what they think and that’s what you’ll think dang blast it.
I just love these eggheads who think that humans are nothing more than a collection of cells, and that there’s nothing else that motivates them.
How do they account for people whose political leanings change over time? Mine have changed a full one hundred and eighty degrees in my lifetime. Did I grow a new brain or something? What happened to the old one?
Poppycock.
Your brain changes over time, too, of course.
Psychology is mostly solid and reproducible, IMHO. Psychologists can prescribe some psych meds depending on location, IIRC.
Yep, if it were innate liberals wouldn’t need to control the education of our young.
“You brain changes over time, too, of course”
Okay, let’s say it changes with your ideology, and in predictanle patterns. Did it cause your politics to change, or did your changing politics change it? Or did it slowly evolve along with your thoughts? Or did your experience change your brain and your brain change your politics, or your experience change your politics and they both change your brain, or what?
How would we ever know?
Reproducable, yes, but in different terms than, say, an experiment with a particle accelerator, and this for various reasons. I have no doubt you can discredit various theories, or maybe even disprove them. You can also confirm theories with adequate statistical certitude to unlike sociology set it clearly outside the humanities and closer to a science.
But what are these theories, anyway? They’re not like in physics where you can express them with the precision of mathematics. No, must express them that way. Psychological theories are much vaguer and much looser. Plus there’s a pretty solid dividing line in the hard sciences between what constitutes science (mostly the math) and what popularization. Psychology is not infinitely but expansively less strict on that account. Very much of it is indistinguishable from sociology or philosophy (of a prosaic sort).
Moreover a lot of it depends not on objective facts but what the subject thinks about it. Which both can never be controlled (with current laws) and never can be decisively established.
Aside from the fact that any conclusions based on a study of the brain should be treated with caution (it is, after all, easily the single most complex thing known to our science), I think that people could be falling into the classic cause and effect trap here. Somebody finds an alleged difference in the brain structure of liberals and conservatives and everyone assumes that means people are born with "predispositions" to certain types of behavior. And of course, it gives plenty of scope for jokes about "brainless liberals"! :)
But, could it not equally be the other way round? As has been said by other posters, the brain does change and develop over time, so maybe its not that your brain structure determines your political "predisposition" but that holding certain viewpoints causes the development of certain areas of the brain? The evidence of this study supports that contention equally as well.
heh..you beat me to it!
There was a liberal/conservative test on here a couple weeks ago. Everyone who reported their score on FR essentially pegged or nearly pegged the meter on the conservative side. You just ask people how they feel about various lib/con splits in the world and they'll tell you. I'm sure if you went to a lib site and ran it you would get the opposite.
Anyone have a link to that quiz available?
Eric Hoffer in “True Believer” offers an explanation. Mass movements are appealing to individuals who want to escape a flawed self by creating an imaginary self and joining a collective whole. See both Elizabeth Warren as an example and Wikipedia: Eric Hoffer and “True Believer”.
Yes, but firstly he was talking about collectivist fanatics. If we were talking about conservatives versus communists, okay. But it’s conservatives versus liberals. Certainly they are relative mass men, but not to that degree.
On the average liberals are of the people and conservatives aristocratic. But we stereotypically like Fourth of July parades and if I watch Hannity, for instance, are increasingly nationalistic. Plus we love the terms limousine liberals and ivy tower elitists. Granted, we mean to say they’re fake elitists and maybe didn’t earn their limousines.
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