House of Eratosthenes

Thus, if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, snobbery is the last refuge of the liberal arts major. The striver may wind up with the bigger house, better car, and nicer vacations, but the very meretriciousness of these aspirations confirms the liberal arts major’s belief in the striver’s inferior taste and barren inner life. Conspicuous consumption advertises not the wealth but the cluelessness of the consumer who acquires to flaunt. It has been supplanted by conspicuous disdain for conspicuous consumption. The Toyota Prius is a testament to its driver’s virtue, not a mark of his prosperity. Its distinctive homeliness has made it a hit, at a time when Honda has cancelled production of the hybrid version of the Accord: it turned out nobody wanted to buy a hybrid that was indistinguishable from an iceberg-melting V-6.

To complement it: Liberals and Conservatives Hold Different Moral Foundations.

The research, published in the May 2009 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that liberals consistently identify with two sets of moral foundations — those that emphasize harm (harm/care) and fairness (fairness/reciprocity). Conservatives, on the other hand, consistently used all five sets of moral foundations more equally.

“In all four studies we found that liberals showed evidence of a morality based primarily on the individualizing foundations, whereas conservatives showed a more even distribution of values, virtues, and concerns,” noted the researchers who were led by Jesse Graham at the University of Virginia.

The harm/care foundation, according to the researchers, reflects the “widespread human concern about caring, nurturing, and protecting vulnerable individuals from harm,” while the fairness-reciprocity foundation is concerned primarily with fairness, reciprocity and justice.

The other three foundations measured by the researchers included ingroup/loyalty (virtues associated with loyalty, patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group’s greater good), authority/respect (virtues associated with obedience and respect for authority, leadership and protection), and purity/sanctity (virtues associated with religion, hygiene and marking off a group’s cultural boundaries).

In four separate experiments that included more than 12,000 participants from across the United States, researchers found consistent support that people who self-identified themselves as holding “liberal” political views were more likely to emphasize the importance of the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations. Conservatives, on the other hand, identified more equally with all five foundations.

This may be the repair of an egregious mistake committed about a year and a half ago: Brains of Liberals, Conservatives May Work Differently, plainly put out by some dedicated liberals who’d missed some of life’s more important lessons.

The work, to be reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, grew out of decades of previous research suggesting that political orientation is linked to certain personality traits or styles of thinking. A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences. Some of the traits associated with conservatives in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression and tolerance of inequality.

What an embarrassment that was. Rather like the blonde protesting that she cannot write dates on her tupperware because the damn things won’t fit in the typewriter…you moron. Anybody of moderate disposition and sound mind, who’s watched intelligent conservatives and liberals go at it, understands it implicitly: Conservatives comprehend history and are ready to write off ideas demonstrated by history to be bad. Liberals, because of a charitable nature, lack of attention to detail, faulty memory, perhaps all three — wanna give it another go. History always began yesterday.

My take on it overall?

Liberals are choreographers. They have these expectations of how people around them, within line-of-sight as well as outside of it, will be doing their dancing. They are grown-up versions of the girls who played with dolls too much, and the boys who didn’t play with their flesh-and-blood friends nearly enough. There’s always this script about what the other person is going to do. Because they have these expectations, they have visions…and because they have these visions, to the weak-of-mind, they sometimes appear to be stronger.

Trouble is, they count on these visions coming to fruition. These plans they have, they depend on it.

Employers will keep hiring after we make it unworkable and exorbitant, in all kinds of ways, to hire people.

As soon as we dispose of our nuclear weapons, that nutbag over there will dispose of his.

People “hate” our country because we “torture,” so if we stop doing it they’ll like us moar-better.

If we stop emitting carbon, the earth will cool down again.

Note: It is exceptionally rare you will hear of a liberal actually saying any of this. Instead, it is much more common for them to say negative things about the status quo: Employers won’t hire people because they’re greedy, that nutbag has nukes because we’ve got ’em, people hate us because we torture, the earth is warming because we’ve emitted.

It is a bandwagon upon which people can hop, when at heart they long to destroy things, and desire to conceal themselves under the disguise of a builder. All things that the liberal wishes to preserve, are, in some ways, destructive agents; all things the liberal wishes to destroy, exist either to build things, or to destroy something that so that something else can be preserved or built. The long-term vision is always that something beneficial or admirable is to be diminished.

But they feeeeeeel good about themselves Morgan, don’t forget how important that is.
- tim | 04/23/2009 @ 12:30

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Link Roundup: Differences Between Liberals and ConservativesThursday, April 23rd, 2009

Link Roundup: Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009