The Conservative and Liberal Brain

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Originally Posted by Don Corleone

Okay Lemur, let me just make certain I have you and your little hack job down correctly here... [snip] Is there anything else you have to say on the matter before I add you to my ignore list?

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Hi Don, you're certainly free to put me on ignore, but I'd hate to think you did it because you're under the impression I agree with the article. I think I used the phrase "among the many things I would contest" when I originally posted. Sorry I didn't go into more detail; I obviously left myself open for misunderstanding.

There's some interesting stuff buried in there, which is why I bothered to repost the article, but I don't agree in the slightest with the blanket generalizations and crass pigeonholing.

I guess I was being a little bit naughty, too, since I knew it would rile up the rightists on the board. Bad lemur! Bad, naughty lemur!

If you haven't noticed, its not all that true. My wife (along with myself) is left leaning, but everything she owns is regularly cleaned (possibly daily, I loose track).
By this study, most oldest brother should've been a leftist. Turns out, he's a conservative (and that says something, as the rest of my family is rather leftist).
Lemur posts is because it is an interesting topic and it does raise questions. The idea is good, but the research seems to be coincidental.

Just forget it! This is just another study that construed its data to find what it wanted.

Generalising in this was is stupid and intolerant and looking for a reason to dislike those it opposes.

Just for the record I am a messy, artistic, book-loving, educated individual living abroad who frequently listens to Classical Music. That said, I am currently a bit more conservative than progressive. I would, however, say that I am very liberal in the original sense of the word.

I think that religious fundamentalism is misguided and that people of that bent can be easily manipulated by some self-serving individuals.

I truly believe that the only people more misguide that the Right-wingers are the Left-wingers. They both have issues with TOLORENCE in varying degrees. They both have TRUST ISSUES. They both believe that they know what is best for everyone. They both want POWER.

:book: The whole thing is cyclical. We are always swinging like a pendulum from right to left and back again.

:whip: The left thinks those on the right are bad heartless knuckle draggers. Wrong!

:wall: The right thinks that the left is full of misguided bleeding hearts who feel but don't think. Wrong!

:idea2: Both think that if they are in power they can fix everything. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!:laugh4: :laugh4: :laugh4:

Government is not going to solve anything, and usually only makes things worse. More laws only make more rich lawyers.:inquisitive:

My favourite misguided fix is: raising the minimum wage. This inflates the economy and makes things toughest for those just above minimum but everyone actually suffers a little bit, without helping what so ever those at the bottom. The only result is that the government has more money from taxes though the money is less valuable.

Another would be taxing bussnises rather than the individual. Well you just raised prices didn't you? The effect was the same…less money for the individual.:dizzy2:

In fairness the left is easier to attack than the right because they try to legislate social fixes a bit more. It is very difficult to put a limit on greed or define how much is enough?

Individual rights and liberties need to be maximised without making it impossible for business to operate. The environment needs to be protected without making ownership a burden.

Corporations and Companies need to be held accountable for the treatment and wellbeing of their employees and the treatment of the environment as much as their stockholders. This is the only fundamental way that I see in redressing the current inequities and allowing people the fruit of their labours. That however is something you are very unlikely to get passed in any first world nation and any despot who tried it is going to find his economy in ruins as everyone packs up to leave.

Communism didn't work because of corruption and being socialist; Socialism doesn't work because it takes incentive from the individual to produce; Capitalism is mostly about greed but it works somewhat better than the first two.
:focus:
So back to the study…. It is a generalised load of BS which only means you can find what you want to find if you make it up and call it a study. The reason that academia is left leaning is because it has become culturally instituted. If you go out to a union jobsite and start polling all those knuckle draggers at the construction site you might be surprised at how many Democrats you have. If you go to the welfare office with all the uneducated poor, guess what you find. Are these generalisations? Yes they are. Are they wrong? No! Not as wrong as those in the study.

Is the left well-meaning? You bet they are!

Is the right well-meaning? Sure!

Is either one of them going to save us? I have serious doubts!:no:

The trouble is that neither side exchanges views but just spouts rhetoric without listening or bothering to think. "That is an overgeneralization". The thing is that everyone is right from their point of view. ROFLMAO:beam: :laugh4:

:2cents:

Education is the pursuit of knowledge, in order to gain knowledge is often needed to see 'the other side' of things, in order to understand it, if you then understand the other side, you are more likely to sympathize with them, which would make educated people more 'liberal'.

Education in countries like Afghanistan is solely based on 'understanding' a single paradigm and therefor do not lead to 'liberalism'.

That said, the very public liberals are often a bad example of what it's all about, just like a lot of public conservatives aren't representative either. One of the big problems of shifting paradigms is that some people start believing in moral relativism, which might have some value, in some cases, but it is counter to the idea of education as a 'synthesis' of knowledge, of course, that's a whole other debate and I won't continue along that path here.

Another problem is that a lot of 'liberals' are just as guilty as hard line conservatives of being stuck in a single paradigm. Environmentalists and animal rights activists (the extreme cases) tend to be good examples of this.