Some other features that can help classify a liberal:
Weaker upper and lower body strength.
Weaker immune system, lower T-cell counts.
Weaker ability to detect odors and tastes like burning smoke and acrid compounds.
I don't claim this view of the world is true, but the analogies they might make is that would be same as
1. Learning to use your righthand dominantly as a lefthanded person.
2. Pretending you were heteronormal when you were actually queer
Both examples have been commonly seen in the world.
That is you can use your executive function to override (m)any of your intrinsic personality traits, but physiologically you remain either gay, lefthanded, or liberal/conservative.
Left/right or liberal/conservative are false dichotomies, at least in U.S. politics. Both major parties are willing to use coercion to achieve their goals, and they don't even differ very much in what those goals are.
The real divide is between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. It would be interesting to see a similar study (or the results of this study re-analyzed) with liberal/conservative replaced with authoritarian/live-and-let-live.
Right. Like abortion. Or death penalty. Or gun ownership. Or taxes. All false dilemmas, right? Both Democrats and Republicans want (obviously!) the same policies for the problems pointed above. Or not really?
No, the real divide is not between libertarians and "statists". You are simply projecting a complicated, multidimensional space down onto a single axis and then twisting it to make your ideology sound right-by-default.
I disagree. I find that Conservatives generally "conserve" a society's traditions, culture, religion, and way of life while Liberals "liberate" a society from it's traditions, culture, religion, and way of life. When taken to an extreme Conservatives can accidentally stagnate a society by holding it back from ideas that further it (see: conservative southern states, Islamic extremist countries), while Liberals can accidentally destroy a society altogether by giving it away in pieces (see: Israel, liberal immigration policies, Islamification of Europe).
They're both extremes on a spectrum. One prevents new ideas that a society wants, the other forces new ideas that a society isn't ready for.
What you describe is a Burkean brand of conservatism, though there are others.
If conservatism was purely about defending the status quo, it would be liberal to enact a flat tax, restructure school funding to work through vouchers, or replace social security with private savings accounts.
There are many other reasons that people are conservative or liberal. I would argue that the most prevalent are various flavors of identity politics.
Your point is internally inconsistent. Authoritarianism is one dimension along which people can differ, but empirically, most people are more or less authoritarian. It's a point which you essentially concede by noting that both parties in the U.S. are authoritarian (and so are most political parties throughout the developed world). So how can you justify calling authoritarianism versus anti-authoritarianism the "real divide" when it only separates a small minority from the great majority?
Please see my comment above. My perception is that the two major parties are controlled by authoritarians, leaving anti-authoritarians no good alternative. They can either vote with the religious fundies or vote with the Nanny statists. By the nature of the system, anti-authoritarians are disenfranchised.
Anti-authoritarians aren't disenfranchised. If there were really that many anti-authoritarians, they would vote for the anti-authoritarian parties that do exist, and those wouldn't be minority parties any more. The nearly half of Americans who don't vote aren't disenfranchised secret anti-authoritarians. They're just politically apathetic.
The difference between left and right may seem less to you than that between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians but what about the numbers? If the former has a roughly 50/50 split in the general population and the latter is 90/10 (I have no idea), then it's not surprising that the former is considered more important.
My perception is that, in the U.S., the fiscal conservatives would be more logically aligned with the social liberals since the freedom to live as one wishes valued by the latter is more consistent with the small government ideals of the former. It seems that whether a person with such views ends up in the Republican or Democrat camp depends on if they are better able to hold their nose in the face of the odious social policies of the religious right or the equally odious and equally authoritarian fiscal and social policies of the Nanny statists.
Regardless of the reasons for the current situation, the study being discussed suffers from its poor choice of categories. As an example, consider abortion rights (a topic I chose to avoid politicizing the discussion further ;-). I fully support a woman's right to choose and for abortion to be safe and available. I've donated to Planned Parenthood in the past. However, I also think it is reprehensible to force people who believe otherwise to pay for such procedures. Am I a liberal or a conservative?
According to those numbers, there are consistently more conservatives than liberals, but about half of the population either identifies as moderate or doesn't identify with anything.
We already have a feel for that from voting patterns. I was more curious about the authoritarian/anti-authoritarian split. My feeling is that, if you can strip out the rhetoric, buzzwords, and partisanship, most people are fine with a relatively powerful government.
I questioned that a population can be categorized in only two sets. It's unfortunate that a lot of people buy into this, and end up trying to be as faithful to one of the label as they can, just like a fan will dedicate himself/herself to a specific sport team for no good reason really than just picking a side and sticking to it.
More generally, it seems the more we look into the seemingly-simple emotion of disgust, the more complicated it gets. While I hate to just drop a Wikipedia page in a comment link, it seems to be a pretty good starting point on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust It's fascinating stuff.
The other nice thing about this article is that it seems to refrain from judgments, which is a problem this general field has had. First, study scientifically. Then, if necessary, judge unscientifically as needed. (No sarcasm. A judgment here is necessarily by definition unscientific, but that doesn't make it wrong... just unscientific, and don't forget it. Unscientific is not a synonym of "wrong" any more than scientific is a synonym of "correct".) However I think that when you study the differences carefully, and with an open mind, it becomes much more difficult to say that one side is right and one side is wrong on the question of "the proper level of disgust". Disgust is a blunt instrument, like any other emotional reaction, and turning something so broad and vague "up" or "down" inevitably results in errors either way. This is especially true when you remember that not all humans live in the same situations... for a middle-class American living in a safe neighborhood, excessive paranoia about out-groups is probably unreasonable, but for someone living in a tribal area, insufficient paranoia about out-groups may very well get you killed.
Disgust is only one of the relevant psychometric dimensions in Jonathan Haidt's model, which is where this bit comes from. In a nutshell, Haidt found that liberals reason about moral problems almost exclusively through the lens of fairness, while Consevatives use a larger "moral toolbox."
One of the more interesting observations out of Haidt's work is that conservatives can reliably articulate the ideas of liberals as a liberal would. But the inverse is not true. Liberals have difficulty emulating perspectives that include concepts such as the divine.
> One of the more interesting observations out of Haidt's work is that conservatives can reliably articulate the ideas of liberals as a liberal would. But the inverse is not true. Liberals have difficulty emulating perspectives that include concepts such as the divine.
In the interest of not setting off a flame war, I'm going to point out that this phenomenon can be explained in at least two directions (the obvious one and the reverse) and leave it at that.
Oh you've confused an insult for an argument; not surprising for one who prays to the sky. Go find some fellow delusional people in a church or something, this is Hacker News, not the Delusional Daily.
So back to your original comment about moral toolboxes--what would belong in yours? How do they get there? What morals do you think others should follow?
> So back to your original comment about moral toolboxes--what would belong in yours? How do they get there? What morals do you think others should follow?
Reality based morality like secular humanism, not ignorance passed down from iron age savages who didn't know fuck all about the world and thought Gods made things happen.
> Reality based morality like secular humanism, not ignorance passed down from iron age savages who didn't know fuck all about the world and thought Gods made things happen.
Sounds pretty arbitrary. How do you choose the right morals? Coin toss? Can you say someone else is wrong?
As opposed to fairly tales, please, you don't get to accuse reasoning as arbitrary while following nonsense made up by savages from the iron age. If anything is arbitrary, it's the shit you call divine.
I did not ignore it, I clearly said secular humanism[1] and later said reasoning which is how it works. Rather than asking me more stupid questions I've already answered, go look up how secular humanism arrives at such answers, they are there.
Morality should be reasoned about, not blindly accepted from the demands of ancient savages. You have a brain, try and use it. At the very least, pay attention when your questions are answered so you don't foolishly keep repeating them due to a lack of reading comprehension.
But you didn't answer the questions. You should spend less time on insults and more on thinking through your answers.
How do you choose the RIGHT (as in, not wrong) morals? In a dispute between two very smart secular humanists who have different morals is there a RIGHT moral code and a wrong one?
Can you say someone else is "wrong" given your understanding of morality?
Once again, I did answer the question, you're just too lazy to see it. You should spend more time reading what I gave you. There's no such thing as absolute right and wrong; right and wrong are agreements between people and what's considered right and wrong change over time and must be worked out through reason and debate. Had you spent an ounce of effort reading the link I gave you, you wouldn't still be asking the same questions since the whole point of secular morality is to answer those questions.
If you think right and wrong can be defined by ignorant people from thousands of years ago, you're being foolish. If you think God defines right and wrong, you're just beyond help.
I've known no atheist who actually believes the nonsense that "right and wrong are agreements between people." They don't actually live their life that way when talking about girls not being able to go to school in Afghanistan or whether it was okay for the Marquis de Sade to torture women for pleasure. How does the atheist impose his moral code on another with consistency when they say with their mouths that "there's no such thing as absolute right and wrong?"
In other words, what would the atheist argue to punish Hitler? After all, German society had redefined humanity to exclude Jews. Hitler was acting consistently within his society's moral code. My worldview (Christian Theistic Worldview, btw) absolutely has no problem saying Hitler was wrong. Right and wrong make sense given the Christian's set of axioms. Not so with the atheist who relies on links to Wikipedia sites: "But Mr. Judge, Hitler wasn't wrong per se, I just disagree with his reasoning as per secular humanism which is TEH AWESOME!!!!111"
How would you characterize your beliefs on the existence of non-material things? Do you believe in a ghost or spirit? Are there non-material objects that exist given your view of the world? For example, is there such a thing as a "law" that governs our thoughts or the natural world?
PS: Why the need for insults? I think we can both learn from each other, but your mocking tone is a bit much.
I'll tell you what, despite the fact that I don't and can't consider this a serious conversation because I consider you delusional and incapable of reason (all theists are), I'll play nice since you are.
> I've known no atheist who actually believes the nonsense that "right and wrong are agreements between people."
I wager you don't understand atheists well enough to have a clue how they actually think because reasoning is a foreign concept to a mind that thinks divine decree is source enough for answers.
There is no such thing as absolute right and wrong, that's not an opinion, that's a fact. If right and wrong were absolute, there'd be no disagreement about what constitutes right and wrong. Right and wrong are determined by the individual and negotiated by society into laws. To even attempt to claim there's a such thing as absolute right and wrong you must demonstrate a source for said absolutes and no one in the history of mankind has been able to do so because it doesn't exist.
Christians (and others) currently conduct in barbarism otherwise known as genital mutilation that any reasoning person sees as clearly wrong, yet you have no problem cutting parts off babies. I think that's wrong, you likely don't, why... because there are no absolutes.
Christian morals are certainly not absolute, they evolve over time, because they, like all morals, are the result of negotiation among individuals.
> After all, German society had redefined humanity to exclude Jews.
And the rest of the world reasoned this was wrong and acted to stop him. See how that works, reasoning among people.
> Hitler was acting consistently within his society's moral code.
But not within the moral code of those who had the power to stop him. Again, reasoning between people.
> My world-view absolutely has no problem saying Hitler was wrong.
Nor do atheists or any other reasoning people. That you think others have trouble saying Hitler was wrong simply shows how badly you understand how others think.
> Right and wrong make sense given the Christian's set of axioms.
No they don't. You worship a mass murderer (from your own perspective) and say murder is wrong. If you think Christians are moral I have news for you, Christians are some of the worst examples of mankind that exist. You teach fear and ignorance, you teach discrimination and hate, you oppress those you don't agree with all the while claiming you're being oppressed.
You are no better than the Taliban; you are in fact the American equivalent.
> Not so with the atheist
False, reasoning always makes sense and always arrives at equal or better answers than following rules lain down by ignorant savages from millennia ago.
> How would you characterize your beliefs on the existence of non-material things?
Depends on what you mean by non-material.
> Do you believe in a ghost or spirit?
There's no evidence that would warrant a belief in such things.
> Are there non-material objects that exist given your view of the world? For example, is there such a thing as a "law" that governs our thoughts or the natural world?
Depends on what you mean by governs. Again, you and I are animals evolved from more violent past animals grasping to survive in a world full of other violent animals. The natural world exists, and follows what appear to be consistent rules that are merely the side effects of the nature of matter and energy; we call these rules Physics.
The Last Psychiatrist wrote some interesting commentary about the Science paper that this article mentions. "[T]he actual finding isn't that conservatives are fearful; it's that liberals seem not to exhibit much response to scary photos. But it's actually a little worse than that."
(http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/09/either_conservatives_...)
Note for the squeamish: There's a photo of one of the fear-inducing (kinda) pictures near the bottom of the blog post. I would like to have some brain bleach for the memory of that picture.
Logically, it shouldn't be scary. I'm pretty sure it's photoshopped... and yet part
of me wants to squirm away from even looking at it in the peripheral vision. Ew ew ew.
Maybe I'm just a psychopath, but after reading your comment, reading through the article, and getting to the picture at the end, I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it. It just looks incredibly fake, like something you'd see in a terrible 50s monster movie.
On it being "worse" and liberals being unafraid in the way psychopaths are -- it could be that they are unafraid of things that can't hurt them, like the "scary" staged photo in the article. Maybe if they used realistic pictures, they'd get an actual response. And of course a picture of something scary and something actually scary is quite different.
Makes me remember when I found a video online of a guy getting attacked by a lionesss. At first I thought it was fake or that the guy would get away, but when I realized it was real and saw him getting more and more tired of fighting the lioness off, I started feeling sick.
So a different takeaway could be that conservative-types are scared of imagined or suggested dangers or that liberal-types are better at discriminating between real and fake dangers. So I think it's more about the way the imaginations of the people work.
The thesis of the blog post wasn't that liberals are psychopaths. It was this:
"You can blame the general news media for being lazy and/or retarded. But the authors of the study are directly to blame for purposely skewing the results to the conclusion that conservatives are cowards.... When you write something, you must be aware of how people will read it. Since it is very obvious how this study will be taken, it is the authors' responsibility to prevent it from happening. Notice that they did not, anywhere write the equally plausible possibility that liberals inexplicably exhibit much less fear than would be expected"
I know, just that they behave similarly to the pictures shown. My point was just that I think the reason liberal-type people don't react to the image can be either that the images themselves are not dangerous, or that the images do not depict actual scary situations (the model with the spider on her head is not actually scared or in danger).
(Whereas a psychopath, lacking empathy, would not react much to even real images)
This is a very interesting comment. I'd love to see a followup study addressing the hypothesis that "liberals" place more emphasis on, and are better at, discriminating true threats from the appearance of threat than "conservatives".
Such improved discrimination wouldn't necessarily have been evolutionarily adaptive, it seems to me. First, there's the risk of false negatives: you might incorrectly dismiss a real threat. Second, such discrimination takes time that might be better spent fleeing (or whatever).
I can see that the optimal strategy might be to maintain a dynamic balance in the population between "discriminators" and "reactors". "Reactors" might get killed less often, but without a certain number of "discriminators" in the population, the tribe (or whatever) would fail to maximize its utilization of the environment and thus not compete well against neighboring tribes.
>it could be that they are unafraid of things that can't hurt them
This was exactly my thought. It is actually unreasonable to be afraid of a photograph.
I would imagine that all people are subject to unreasonable levels of fear in various situations, but this does seem to show that conservatives may experience higher levels of unreasonable fear.
That quote doesn't seem right, either. The population is something like 50/50 liberal/conservative, right? So compared to the average person, it seems that this indicates both that conservatives are more fearful than average and that liberals are closer to a particular form of psychopathy. Choosing either one of these and ignoring the other shows a pretty clear bias.
I think most people are too ignorant to even be either party but instead vote narrowly on issues that benefit them or stupid stuff. that's why we end up with divided government with the president as one party and congress as others.
The image felt very fake to me. If a spider were on my face, I would freak out internally, stand very still and slowly put my hand next to it to give it a way off so it doesn't bite my face.
If a spider landed on my face, I'd be flailing my arms back and forth trying to swat the spider away freaking out.
The neutral response is the proper one - if I saw someone screaming and standing still with a spider on their face, I would assume it is an actor.
What do I conclude from this study? Liberals spend much more time on the internet because they are more tech savvy as a community, and therefore have seen lots of "scary" pictures.
seriously. I didn't even react to that picture. it didn't scare me in the least, the spider seemed too fake. if I saw this spider in real life id be scared. now I know my mother who is very conservative would have freaked out if she saw that picture.
It's dangerous to take a result like this and speculate on reasons, without developing proof that supports those reasons. The research mentioned in the article measured one particular trait which seems to be correlated with expressed political views, and provides the evidence for that (eye-tracking data); however, the article goes on to propose reasons for that trait and correlation, without justifying the reasons with any evidence. Perhaps the underlying research gives reasons, or perhaps it doesn't, but either way the article seems irresponsible to report those reasons without supporting evidence.
This article also assumes a single axis, single-variable political spectrum from liberal to conservative, which is an absurdly simplistic view.
The one thing that does seem notable in the article is the conclusion, though. Put that together with Duverger's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law), which explains why we have two political parties in the first place, and perhaps the article's research explains where we got the rather odd party division we have, rather than a more useful one. I dislike the conclusion that this might make compromise easier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation), but perhaps if we can recognize the current liberal/conservative distinction (as expressed in politics today) as a difference that has little to do with useful political views, perhaps we can talk less about the hot-button items that currently make up news and campaigns, and start getting issues that matter into the political spectrum.
From the outside, it has looked for a long time as if avoiding issues that matter is the whole point of your political system. No offense, we (Canada) are not much better, but your problems in that regard seem more dire.
Just because there isn't a consensus doesn't mean that issues are avoided.
Many questions do not have answers that two-thirds of the country can agree on. For small questions, perhaps that's harmful. However, for large questions, it's definitely a feature of the system that the electorate is forced to deliberate until wider agreement is reached.
Are there issue in particular that you think are important yet avoided?
> Many questions do not have answers that two-thirds of the country can agree on. For small questions, perhaps that's harmful. However, for large questions, it's definitely a feature of the system that the electorate is forced to deliberate until wider agreement is reached.
It's not a feature, however, to spend so much time butting heads over a small handful of issues that nothing else gets much discussion time, and that everything else has to rally under one of those big banners to get noticed or get action taken. Some issues just need to be written off as disproportionate time-sinks that nobody will ever agree on. Disagreement at the level you're talking about is a strong sign that there's no strong consensus in any one direction, which itself provides strong evidence that government should stay out of those issues.
> Are there issue in particular that you think are important yet avoided?
Among many other things, we seem to have completely lost the small/large government distinction that used to characterize the two parties, in favor of a large/large government that only argues about what to do with itself. The question of doing nothing never comes up or gets any discussion time at all. Whichever side of that distinction you might favor, I think it's pretty clearly worthy of consideration.
I'd also love to see more active discussion, consideration, and avoidance of the Overton window (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) as a political failure mode, rather than business as usual.
> From the outside, it has looked for a long time as if avoiding issues that matter is the whole point of your political system. No offense,
None taken; I find that a problem myself. Though I'd characterize it less as "avoiding issues that matter" and more as "over-inflating issues that don't, crowding out everything else".
When I look at politics elsewhere, though, I tend to see the same issue, just shifted elsewhere on the spectrum; I don't think this problem is unique to US politics.
As with most other articles about politics, it's easy to miss the forest through the trees. There's one most important, indisputable point: that we can generally be divided into two groups politically, and those divisions go well beyond opinions developed over time.
How you classify these groups (liberal vs. conservative, individualist vs. collectivist, voluntaryist vs. statist -- I tend to use the language of i vs. c) doesn't really matter. The two groups exist and are verifiably distinguishable.
The important part (and I say this as a libertarian) is that both groups are necessary to the health of a functioning society. It is both useful and necessary for (I'm generalizing here) one group to focus on individualistic pursuits while the other focuses on the well-being of the collective at large -- and we probably would have a healthy, functioning society if each side could appreciate the other's differences of perspective.
Instead, both sides are mutually antagonistic, and exploited by the political class, which almost always acts in its own exclusive interest.
>we probably would have a healthy, functioning society if each side could appreciate the other's differences of perspective.
But, what this article/study suggests is that those differences are hard-wired and almost visceral. This would explain why it is so difficult for each side to appreciate the other's perspective, as well as why it's so easy for the political class to exploit both.
78 comments
[ 5012 ms ] story [ 4411 ms ] threadWeaker upper and lower body strength. Weaker immune system, lower T-cell counts. Weaker ability to detect odors and tastes like burning smoke and acrid compounds.
1. Learning to use your righthand dominantly as a lefthanded person. 2. Pretending you were heteronormal when you were actually queer
Both examples have been commonly seen in the world.
That is you can use your executive function to override (m)any of your intrinsic personality traits, but physiologically you remain either gay, lefthanded, or liberal/conservative.
The real divide is between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. It would be interesting to see a similar study (or the results of this study re-analyzed) with liberal/conservative replaced with authoritarian/live-and-let-live.
For one thing, property is theft ;-).
They're both extremes on a spectrum. One prevents new ideas that a society wants, the other forces new ideas that a society isn't ready for.
If conservatism was purely about defending the status quo, it would be liberal to enact a flat tax, restructure school funding to work through vouchers, or replace social security with private savings accounts.
There are many other reasons that people are conservative or liberal. I would argue that the most prevalent are various flavors of identity politics.
My perception is that, in the U.S., the fiscal conservatives would be more logically aligned with the social liberals since the freedom to live as one wishes valued by the latter is more consistent with the small government ideals of the former. It seems that whether a person with such views ends up in the Republican or Democrat camp depends on if they are better able to hold their nose in the face of the odious social policies of the religious right or the equally odious and equally authoritarian fiscal and social policies of the Nanny statists.
Regardless of the reasons for the current situation, the study being discussed suffers from its poor choice of categories. As an example, consider abortion rights (a topic I chose to avoid politicizing the discussion further ;-). I fully support a woman's right to choose and for abortion to be safe and available. I've donated to Planned Parenthood in the past. However, I also think it is reprehensible to force people who believe otherwise to pay for such procedures. Am I a liberal or a conservative?
http://www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab3_1.htm
According to those numbers, there are consistently more conservatives than liberals, but about half of the population either identifies as moderate or doesn't identify with anything.
Edit: From the same source: http://www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab4a_1.htm
Bald, Not Bald. Q.E.D.
The other nice thing about this article is that it seems to refrain from judgments, which is a problem this general field has had. First, study scientifically. Then, if necessary, judge unscientifically as needed. (No sarcasm. A judgment here is necessarily by definition unscientific, but that doesn't make it wrong... just unscientific, and don't forget it. Unscientific is not a synonym of "wrong" any more than scientific is a synonym of "correct".) However I think that when you study the differences carefully, and with an open mind, it becomes much more difficult to say that one side is right and one side is wrong on the question of "the proper level of disgust". Disgust is a blunt instrument, like any other emotional reaction, and turning something so broad and vague "up" or "down" inevitably results in errors either way. This is especially true when you remember that not all humans live in the same situations... for a middle-class American living in a safe neighborhood, excessive paranoia about out-groups is probably unreasonable, but for someone living in a tribal area, insufficient paranoia about out-groups may very well get you killed.
http://www.moralfoundations.org/
One of the more interesting observations out of Haidt's work is that conservatives can reliably articulate the ideas of liberals as a liberal would. But the inverse is not true. Liberals have difficulty emulating perspectives that include concepts such as the divine.
In the interest of not setting off a flame war, I'm going to point out that this phenomenon can be explained in at least two directions (the obvious one and the reverse) and leave it at that.
I would hope so, since divine anything is simply ignorant and doesn't belong in any moral toolbox.
Please save your intolerant ignorance for your atheist message boards. There is nothing ignorant about belief in God.
There's little more ignorant than an adult who still has an imaginary friend and insists he's real.
Oooh, can I argue the same way? I mean, by begging the question and arguing using ipse dixit?
Here goes:
There's little more ignorant than an adult who doesn't believe in God.
So back to your original comment about moral toolboxes--what would belong in yours? How do they get there? What morals do you think others should follow?
Do you? Do you need to go pray now?
> So back to your original comment about moral toolboxes--what would belong in yours? How do they get there? What morals do you think others should follow?
Reality based morality like secular humanism, not ignorance passed down from iron age savages who didn't know fuck all about the world and thought Gods made things happen.
Sounds pretty arbitrary. How do you choose the right morals? Coin toss? Can you say someone else is wrong?
As opposed to fairly tales, please, you don't get to accuse reasoning as arbitrary while following nonsense made up by savages from the iron age. If anything is arbitrary, it's the shit you call divine.
How do you choose the right morals? Coin toss? Can you say someone else is wrong?
Morality should be reasoned about, not blindly accepted from the demands of ancient savages. You have a brain, try and use it. At the very least, pay attention when your questions are answered so you don't foolishly keep repeating them due to a lack of reading comprehension.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism
How do you choose the RIGHT (as in, not wrong) morals? In a dispute between two very smart secular humanists who have different morals is there a RIGHT moral code and a wrong one?
Can you say someone else is "wrong" given your understanding of morality?
If you think right and wrong can be defined by ignorant people from thousands of years ago, you're being foolish. If you think God defines right and wrong, you're just beyond help.
I've known no atheist who actually believes the nonsense that "right and wrong are agreements between people." They don't actually live their life that way when talking about girls not being able to go to school in Afghanistan or whether it was okay for the Marquis de Sade to torture women for pleasure. How does the atheist impose his moral code on another with consistency when they say with their mouths that "there's no such thing as absolute right and wrong?"
In other words, what would the atheist argue to punish Hitler? After all, German society had redefined humanity to exclude Jews. Hitler was acting consistently within his society's moral code. My worldview (Christian Theistic Worldview, btw) absolutely has no problem saying Hitler was wrong. Right and wrong make sense given the Christian's set of axioms. Not so with the atheist who relies on links to Wikipedia sites: "But Mr. Judge, Hitler wasn't wrong per se, I just disagree with his reasoning as per secular humanism which is TEH AWESOME!!!!111"
How would you characterize your beliefs on the existence of non-material things? Do you believe in a ghost or spirit? Are there non-material objects that exist given your view of the world? For example, is there such a thing as a "law" that governs our thoughts or the natural world?
PS: Why the need for insults? I think we can both learn from each other, but your mocking tone is a bit much.
> I've known no atheist who actually believes the nonsense that "right and wrong are agreements between people."
I wager you don't understand atheists well enough to have a clue how they actually think because reasoning is a foreign concept to a mind that thinks divine decree is source enough for answers.
There is no such thing as absolute right and wrong, that's not an opinion, that's a fact. If right and wrong were absolute, there'd be no disagreement about what constitutes right and wrong. Right and wrong are determined by the individual and negotiated by society into laws. To even attempt to claim there's a such thing as absolute right and wrong you must demonstrate a source for said absolutes and no one in the history of mankind has been able to do so because it doesn't exist.
Christians (and others) currently conduct in barbarism otherwise known as genital mutilation that any reasoning person sees as clearly wrong, yet you have no problem cutting parts off babies. I think that's wrong, you likely don't, why... because there are no absolutes.
Christian morals are certainly not absolute, they evolve over time, because they, like all morals, are the result of negotiation among individuals.
> After all, German society had redefined humanity to exclude Jews.
And the rest of the world reasoned this was wrong and acted to stop him. See how that works, reasoning among people.
> Hitler was acting consistently within his society's moral code.
But not within the moral code of those who had the power to stop him. Again, reasoning between people.
> My world-view absolutely has no problem saying Hitler was wrong.
Nor do atheists or any other reasoning people. That you think others have trouble saying Hitler was wrong simply shows how badly you understand how others think.
> Right and wrong make sense given the Christian's set of axioms.
No they don't. You worship a mass murderer (from your own perspective) and say murder is wrong. If you think Christians are moral I have news for you, Christians are some of the worst examples of mankind that exist. You teach fear and ignorance, you teach discrimination and hate, you oppress those you don't agree with all the while claiming you're being oppressed.
You are no better than the Taliban; you are in fact the American equivalent.
> Not so with the atheist
False, reasoning always makes sense and always arrives at equal or better answers than following rules lain down by ignorant savages from millennia ago.
> How would you characterize your beliefs on the existence of non-material things?
Depends on what you mean by non-material.
> Do you believe in a ghost or spirit?
There's no evidence that would warrant a belief in such things.
> Are there non-material objects that exist given your view of the world? For example, is there such a thing as a "law" that governs our thoughts or the natural world?
Depends on what you mean by governs. Again, you and I are animals evolved from more violent past animals grasping to survive in a world full of other violent animals. The natural world exists, and follows what appear to be consistent rules that are merely the side effects of the nature of matter and energy; we call these rules Physics.
Update after downvotes: apparently no one reading this has a sense of humor, liberal or conservative.
Of course, the other possibility is that they do.
Logically, it shouldn't be scary. I'm pretty sure it's photoshopped... and yet part of me wants to squirm away from even looking at it in the peripheral vision. Ew ew ew.
I must be a psychopath :-)
Makes me remember when I found a video online of a guy getting attacked by a lionesss. At first I thought it was fake or that the guy would get away, but when I realized it was real and saw him getting more and more tired of fighting the lioness off, I started feeling sick.
So a different takeaway could be that conservative-types are scared of imagined or suggested dangers or that liberal-types are better at discriminating between real and fake dangers. So I think it's more about the way the imaginations of the people work.
"You can blame the general news media for being lazy and/or retarded. But the authors of the study are directly to blame for purposely skewing the results to the conclusion that conservatives are cowards.... When you write something, you must be aware of how people will read it. Since it is very obvious how this study will be taken, it is the authors' responsibility to prevent it from happening. Notice that they did not, anywhere write the equally plausible possibility that liberals inexplicably exhibit much less fear than would be expected"
(Whereas a psychopath, lacking empathy, would not react much to even real images)
Such improved discrimination wouldn't necessarily have been evolutionarily adaptive, it seems to me. First, there's the risk of false negatives: you might incorrectly dismiss a real threat. Second, such discrimination takes time that might be better spent fleeing (or whatever).
I can see that the optimal strategy might be to maintain a dynamic balance in the population between "discriminators" and "reactors". "Reactors" might get killed less often, but without a certain number of "discriminators" in the population, the tribe (or whatever) would fail to maximize its utilization of the environment and thus not compete well against neighboring tribes.
This was exactly my thought. It is actually unreasonable to be afraid of a photograph.
I would imagine that all people are subject to unreasonable levels of fear in various situations, but this does seem to show that conservatives may experience higher levels of unreasonable fear.
If a spider landed on my face, I'd be flailing my arms back and forth trying to swat the spider away freaking out.
The neutral response is the proper one - if I saw someone screaming and standing still with a spider on their face, I would assume it is an actor.
What do I conclude from this study? Liberals spend much more time on the internet because they are more tech savvy as a community, and therefore have seen lots of "scary" pictures.
This article also assumes a single axis, single-variable political spectrum from liberal to conservative, which is an absurdly simplistic view.
The one thing that does seem notable in the article is the conclusion, though. Put that together with Duverger's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law), which explains why we have two political parties in the first place, and perhaps the article's research explains where we got the rather odd party division we have, rather than a more useful one. I dislike the conclusion that this might make compromise easier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation), but perhaps if we can recognize the current liberal/conservative distinction (as expressed in politics today) as a difference that has little to do with useful political views, perhaps we can talk less about the hot-button items that currently make up news and campaigns, and start getting issues that matter into the political spectrum.
Many questions do not have answers that two-thirds of the country can agree on. For small questions, perhaps that's harmful. However, for large questions, it's definitely a feature of the system that the electorate is forced to deliberate until wider agreement is reached.
Are there issue in particular that you think are important yet avoided?
It's not a feature, however, to spend so much time butting heads over a small handful of issues that nothing else gets much discussion time, and that everything else has to rally under one of those big banners to get noticed or get action taken. Some issues just need to be written off as disproportionate time-sinks that nobody will ever agree on. Disagreement at the level you're talking about is a strong sign that there's no strong consensus in any one direction, which itself provides strong evidence that government should stay out of those issues.
> Are there issue in particular that you think are important yet avoided?
Among many other things, we seem to have completely lost the small/large government distinction that used to characterize the two parties, in favor of a large/large government that only argues about what to do with itself. The question of doing nothing never comes up or gets any discussion time at all. Whichever side of that distinction you might favor, I think it's pretty clearly worthy of consideration.
I'd also love to see more active discussion, consideration, and avoidance of the Overton window (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) as a political failure mode, rather than business as usual.
None taken; I find that a problem myself. Though I'd characterize it less as "avoiding issues that matter" and more as "over-inflating issues that don't, crowding out everything else".
When I look at politics elsewhere, though, I tend to see the same issue, just shifted elsewhere on the spectrum; I don't think this problem is unique to US politics.
How you classify these groups (liberal vs. conservative, individualist vs. collectivist, voluntaryist vs. statist -- I tend to use the language of i vs. c) doesn't really matter. The two groups exist and are verifiably distinguishable.
The important part (and I say this as a libertarian) is that both groups are necessary to the health of a functioning society. It is both useful and necessary for (I'm generalizing here) one group to focus on individualistic pursuits while the other focuses on the well-being of the collective at large -- and we probably would have a healthy, functioning society if each side could appreciate the other's differences of perspective.
Instead, both sides are mutually antagonistic, and exploited by the political class, which almost always acts in its own exclusive interest.
But, what this article/study suggests is that those differences are hard-wired and almost visceral. This would explain why it is so difficult for each side to appreciate the other's perspective, as well as why it's so easy for the political class to exploit both.