All Things Biden: Is It Over Yet?

[rainbow]

Your Biden, you know, the one you WISHED would defeat Trump. I was talking about him.

Meh, I wanted Bernie.

Good not to have Tronald, though.

[Cunt]

Trump seems more left/liberal than Biden, but you do you.

[JimC]

Trump seems more left/liberal than Biden, but you do you.

"you do you"

[Cunt]

Isn't 'liberal' something to do with freedom?

Or does 'liberal' mean communism?

[Joe]

You could look at a dictionary.

[Brian Peacock]

You could look at a dictionary.

What, and waste a perfectly good strawman?

[Cunt]

You could look at a dictionary.

I think I prefer to let the user define their terms. With that in mind, to you AND him...

Is Sargon of Akkad/Carl Benjamin liberal?

[Hermit]

Is Sargon of Akkad/Carl Benjamin liberal?

More importantly: Is this zygocactus a fascist?



These, and other irrelevancies may never be answered, but they do a fantastic job of diverting any discussion into fuck knows where.

[Joe]

You could look at a dictionary.

What, and waste a perfectly good strawman?

[Cunt]

The question would pin down what one means by 'liberal' so I can certainly understand you dodging it. Keep it irrelevant!

Congrats on your Biden getting in. Is it over yet?

[Joe]

You could look at a dictionary.

I think I prefer to let the user define their terms.

Well, since you're the user, get to it.

Trump seems more left/liberal than Biden, but you do you.

[Cunt]

The 'left' has always meant liberal to me. Liberal in the sense of freedom to choose for individuals.

You want to suggest Biden is better for individual freedom, ok, but it doesn't look that way from an individual.

I understand it might look that way to certain groups, but I prefer to back the smallest minority.

[Joe]

The 'left' has always meant liberal to me. Liberal in the sense of freedom to choose for individuals.

You want to suggest Biden is better for individual freedom, ok, but it doesn't look that way from an individual.

I understand it might look that way to certain groups, but I prefer to back the smallest minority.

I don't "want to suggest" anything Cunt, and you don't know enough about my thinking to be making assumptions about it.

I like the dictionary definition better myself, but I understand you might not want to think about it in such complex terms.

[Cunt]

Right, Joe. To me, Trump fits that a lot more than Harris does.

I mean, you can imagine how she'll run the presidency over the next four years, but it's even easier to look at her long record.

She is WAY less liberal than Trump has been. So far, anyway.

[Brian Peacock]

Let's also acknowledge that 'liberal' is a pejorative term in the US, one that stands in for 'un-American' along with 'socialist' or 'anti-fascist'. There's also this...

Conservatives Big on Fear, Brain Study Finds

Peering inside the brain with MRI scans, researchers at University College London found that self-described conservative students had a larger amygdala than liberals. The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that is active during states of fear and anxiety. Liberals had more gray matter at least in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that helps people cope with complexity.

The results are not that surprising as they fit in with conclusions from other studies. Just a year ago, researchers from Harvard and UCLA San Diego reported finding a "liberal" gene. This gene had a tiny effect, however, and worked only for adolescents having many friends. The results also mesh with psychological studies on conflict monitoring.

What It Means
There is a big unknown underlying these findings. Supposing that the size of one's amygdala really does increase the likelihood of being a conservative. Is the size of the amygdala determined at birth, or does it perhaps increase with frightening childhood experiences, such as authoritarian parenting and corporal punishment?

Similarly, one might ask whether the gray matter difference is affected by exposure to educational challenge, social diversity, or childhood cognitive enrichment.

The born versus acquired perspective on political attitudes is important to psychologists. After all, if political proclivities are fixed at birth in terms of brain anatomy, there is little hope of change. Most of us would probably like to see a world in which political attitudes were less polarized, and more changeable, but that may be a pipe dream.

Meanwhile, the neuro-scientific fact of two very different political creatures helps clarify much of the political antics of modern democracies.

Most societies are divided into a party that wants change (the more liberal party) and one that is afraid of change (the conservatives). The liberal party is generally more intellectual and the conservative party is more anti-intellectual.

The conservative party is big on national defense and magnifies our perception of threat, whether of foreign aggressors, immigrants, terrorists, or invading ideologies like Communism. To a conservative, the world really is a frightening place.

Given that their brains are so different, it is hardly surprising that liberals and conservatives should spend so much time talking across each other and never achieving real dialog or consensus.

As scientists we hope that these results are replicated because they shed so much light on political behavior. As citizens, we would prefer if politicians were not divided into such different categories of political animal...

-- read on dear reader, read on --

Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives

BLUE STATE, red state. Big government, big business. Gay rights, fetal rights. The United States is riven by the politics of extremes. To paraphrase humor columnist Dave Barry, Republicans think of Democrats as godless, unpatriotic, Volvo-driving, France-loving, elitist latte guzzlers, whereas Democrats dismiss Republicans as ignorant, NASCAR-obsessed, gun-fondling religious fanatics. An exaggeration, for sure, but the reality is still pretty stark. Congress is in a perpetual stalemate because of the two parties' inability to find middle ground on practically anything.

According to the experts who study political leanings, liberals and conservatives do not just see things differently. They are different—in their personalities and even their unconscious reactions to the world around them. For example, in a study published in January, a team led by psychologist Michael Dodd and political scientist John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln found that when viewing a collage of photographs, conservatives' eyes unconsciously lingered 15 percent longer on repellent images, such as car wrecks and excrement—suggesting that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to assessing potential threats.

Meanwhile examining the contents of 76 college students' bedrooms, as one group did in a 2008 study, revealed that conservatives possessed more cleaning and organizational items, such as ironing boards and calendars, confirmation that they are orderly and self-disciplined. Liberals owned more books and travel-related memorabilia, which conforms with previous research suggesting that they are open and novelty-seeking.

“These are not superficial differences. They are psychologically deep,” says psychologist John Jost of New York University, a co-author of the bedroom study. “My hunch is that the capacity to organize the political world into left or right may be a part of human nature.”

Although conservatives and liberals are fundamentally different, hints are emerging about how to bring them together—or at least help them coexist. In his recent book The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt of the N.Y.U. Stern School of Business argues that liberals and conservatives need not revile one another as immoral on issues such as birth control, gay marriage or health care reform. Even if these two worldviews clash, they are equally grounded in ethics, he writes. Meanwhile studies by Jost and others suggest that political views reside on a continuum that is mediated in part by universal human emotions such as fear. Under certain circumstances, everyone can shift closer to the middle—or drift further apart.

The Fear Factor

Psychologists have found that conservatives are fundamentally more anxious than liberals, which may be why they typically desire stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions. “Conservatism, apparently, helps to protect people against some of the natural difficulties of living,” says social psychologist Paul Nail of the University of Central Arkansas. “The fact is we don't live in a completely safe world. Things can and do go wrong. But if I can impose this order on it by my worldview, I can keep my anxiety to a manageable level.”

Anxiety is an emotion that waxes and wanes in all of us, and as it swings up or down our political views can shift in its wake. When people feel safe and secure, they become more liberal; when they feel threatened, they become more conservative. Research conducted by Nail and his colleague in the weeks after September 11, 2001, showed that people of all political persuasions became more conservative in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, in an upcoming study, a team led by Yale University psychologist Jaime Napier found that asking Republicans to imagine that they possessed superpowers and were impermeable to injury made them more liberal. “There is some range within which people can be moved,” Jost says....

-- go on, treat yourself to some science --