Researchers spread liberal mythology

[Stephanie]

So you posted it to piss people off? And you call me hateful?

You fell for it. Don't know what to tell ya..

 

[Larkinn]

So, you do not care that our Government and our troops are referred to as terrorists. As mass murderers? Thanks for that clarification.

Our government has committed mass murder. As for terrorism, considering the stupidity of the term and how its used nowadays, no it doesn't really bother me.

And you can not even answer a simple question. What conservative or Conservatives on this board do you think are smarter than you? Please do me the favor of NOT pretending you don't think your smarter than all of them unless your willing to anser the question. It is a simple one after all.

Asking me which conservatives I think are smarter than me is NOT the same thing as me saying I don't think I am smarter than all of them.

This only applies to conservatives:

The ones who I think I am smarter than: You, Bern, Stephanie, American_first, and probably a few others.

The ones who I think are smarter than me on this board: None.

The ones who are smarter than me on other boards I frequent: DonQuixote.

The ones who I am unsure of on this board: Gunny, Domino

The ones who I am unsure of on other boards: Spindok.

Happy now? Will you finally shut the fuck up about this? Yes, I think I am smarter than you. Probably any objective criteria would show this to be the case. Boo hoo so sad for you, get over it. What would you like me to do, lie to you and pretend that you can compare? You need to be fucking babied by strangers on the internet?

 

[Larkinn]

You fell for it. Don't know what to tell ya..

Oh wowsers...you sure did trick me into debating about politics on an internet politics board. Oh noes!

 

[Stephanie]

Oh wowsers...you sure did trick me into debating about politics on an internet politics board. Oh noes!

 

[Ninja]

So have any of you read the original paper?

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Our government has committed mass murder. As for terrorism, considering the stupidity of the term and how its used nowadays, no it doesn't really bother me.



Asking me which conservatives I think are smarter than me is NOT the same thing as me saying I don't think I am smarter than all of them.

This only applies to conservatives:

The ones who I think I am smarter than: You, Bern, Stephanie, American_first, and probably a few others.

The ones who I think are smarter than me on this board: None.

The ones who are smarter than me on other boards I frequent: DonQuixote.

The ones who I am unsure of on this board: Gunny, Domino

The ones who I am unsure of on other boards: Spindok.

Happy now? Will you finally shut the fuck up about this? Yes, I think I am smarter than you. Probably any objective criteria would show this to be the case. Boo hoo so sad for you, get over it. What would you like me to do, lie to you and pretend that you can compare? You need to be fucking babied by strangers on the internet?

Just curious how you get that head of yours through doors is all.

 

[Larkinn]

No, but I would be interested too Snowman. Have a link?

RGS...you confuse having a generally accurate view of myself with having a large ego. As I said in another thread, intelligence is not the be all and end all of things. Its just another trait no "better" or "worse" than any number of other traits. I'm not a better person for it at all. There are many things I suck at. I am quite unartistic, unfortunately. I suck at football, baseball, and ballroom dancing as well.

 

[Ninja]

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn1979.html

If you don't have a Nature subscription you'll probably have to find a library that does.

 

[jillian]

Jilly dear..I posted it mainly to get a rise out people.
It's not that I agreed with everything in it 100%, except for the part I highlighted...So I guess my intended purpose worked...
And it isn't a hateful article...it's not any more hateful than what people say about conservatives...
Now, I wonder who has the thin skins..

So in other words, love, you were trolling? I'm shocked..

I don't think it's thin-skinned to point out that an article is really ignorant and meanspirited. Just stating the truth.

 

[doniston]

To reassure themselves that liberals are smart, left-wing social scientists periodically conduct research that proves conservatives are Neanderthals. Their latest foray, by New York University researchers squandering $1.2 million in federal grants, concluded the usual stuff — conservatives are simpleminded, less adaptive to change, etc. — plus Ronald Reagan's brain worked like Adolf Hitler's and conservative drivers have difficulty finding their way home when faced with a detour. Their conclusions were based on research subjects' responses to reflexive tests, as if their ability to answer an either-or question correctly in a fraction of a second is predictive of their ability to think analytically.

Liberals, meanwhile, were found to be "relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity" but "more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty." In another context, liberals would condemn stereotypes as racist, sexist or homophobic. But when sweeping generalities reflect poorly on conservatism, well, then they must be true.

But if liberals sort facts better and are good at discarding failed ideas, explain the War on Poverty. Talk about quagmires. This one has lasted more than 40 years and consumed $11 trillion without coming close to its promise to eradicate poverty. Despite irrefutable evidence that their calcified positions are destructive if not deadly, why do liberals also cling to "progressive" policies that chain people to their government, restrict gun ownership, kill unborn children and destroy families?

These and other liberal positions are consistent with the socialist world view, and socialism has failed every time it's been tried: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, The New Deal, The Great Society, universal health care, etc. Today, the new darling of socialism, Hugo Chavez, is shuttering schools in Venezuela that refuse to use government-approved textbooks.

The dangers of socialism were manifest when economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek published "The Road to Serfdom" in 1944. Socialism, he wrote, exchanges individual liberty for state-dictated "fairness," which always conflicts the unalienable rights of free people. Even tentative steps toward central planning, redistribution of wealth and economic control inevitably lead to totalitarianism. "There can be no doubt that the promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda. But it only would heighten the tragedy if it should prove that what was promised to us as the Road to Freedom was in fact the High Road to Servitude."

His words are truer today than ever, yet liberals seem intellectually incapable of seeing the truth. That says a lot more about how their brains function than any contrived laboratory experiment ever will.
http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2007/09/22/opinion/285997.txt

Your distress is really quite funny. considering the misinformation you spread about Israel and Palastine.

and consider this. The War on poverty continues thru numerous administrations. Do you think they were all Liberally based? if not, why was it continued? ----Seems to put the lie to your assumptions.

 

[AllieBaba]

Enlightening thread.

BTW, the post DOES call the methods to task, besides just attacking the results. Perhaps you should read it again, while trying to resist popping blood vessels in your head.

Nor is it particularly hateful. Dems love to label anything they don't like as bigoted and hateful. When used by the left, those are by-words that long ago stopped having any meaning to anyone listening to them.

 

[midcan5]

Egads, name calling and enough ad hominems to sink the Titanic.

But there is one point I want to counter.

The war on poverty and the great society did more to help the hard working needy than anything anyone else had done before. That it did not correct some of the more difficult issues, nor reduce poverty completely, is obvious but neither did the changes Reagan/Bush/Clinton initiated, reduce the number in the poverty category. If there were a heaven LBJ would be there for what he tried to accomplish - one can say that of few people. Black earnings were only 54% of whites in 1963, Johnson turned that around and helped build a better society for everyone.


[ame]http://www.amazon.com/Persistence-Poverty-Economics-Well-Off-Cant/dp/0300120907/ref=sr_1_10_s9_rk/102-9298559-0444957?ie=UTF8&s=books&s9r=8a585b43142117e30114b284f55713b2&itemPosition=10&qid=1192213940&sr=1-10[/ame]

 

[Truthmatters]

To reassure themselves that liberals are smart, left-wing social scientists periodically conduct research that proves conservatives are Neanderthals. Their latest foray, by New York University researchers squandering $1.2 million in federal grants, concluded the usual stuff — conservatives are simpleminded, less adaptive to change, etc. — plus Ronald Reagan's brain worked like Adolf Hitler's and conservative drivers have difficulty finding their way home when faced with a detour. Their conclusions were based on research subjects' responses to reflexive tests, as if their ability to answer an either-or question correctly in a fraction of a second is predictive of their ability to think analytically.

Liberals, meanwhile, were found to be "relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity" but "more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty." In another context, liberals would condemn stereotypes as racist, sexist or homophobic. But when sweeping generalities reflect poorly on conservatism, well, then they must be true.

But if liberals sort facts better and are good at discarding failed ideas, explain the War on Poverty. Talk about quagmires. This one has lasted more than 40 years and consumed $11 trillion without coming close to its promise to eradicate poverty. Despite irrefutable evidence that their calcified positions are destructive if not deadly, why do liberals also cling to "progressive" policies that chain people to their government, restrict gun ownership, kill unborn children and destroy families?

These and other liberal positions are consistent with the socialist world view, and socialism has failed every time it's been tried: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, The New Deal, The Great Society, universal health care, etc. Today, the new darling of socialism, Hugo Chavez, is shuttering schools in Venezuela that refuse to use government-approved textbooks.

The dangers of socialism were manifest when economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek published "The Road to Serfdom" in 1944. Socialism, he wrote, exchanges individual liberty for state-dictated "fairness," which always conflicts the unalienable rights of free people. Even tentative steps toward central planning, redistribution of wealth and economic control inevitably lead to totalitarianism. "There can be no doubt that the promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda. But it only would heighten the tragedy if it should prove that what was promised to us as the Road to Freedom was in fact the High Road to Servitude."

His words are truer today than ever, yet liberals seem intellectually incapable of seeing the truth. That says a lot more about how their brains function than any contrived laboratory experiment ever will.
http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2007/09/22/opinion/285997.txt

I guess you would like science to only find good things about conservitives ?

Look when you have to spew hate on science to make your self feel good you know you are out of touch with reality.

 

[AllieBaba]

Another myth. Conservatives don't spew hate on science, though they won't just accept something as fact because a lot of people say it. Nor do they go for scientific theme fads.....Unlike our friends, the social...er...the democrats.

 

[Larkinn]

BTW, the post DOES call the methods to task, besides just attacking the results. Perhaps you should read it again, while trying to resist popping blood vessels in your head.

No, it really doesn't.

Nor is it particularly hateful. Dems love to label anything they don't like as bigoted and hateful. When used by the left, those are by-words that long ago stopped having any meaning to anyone listening to them.

Ahh, the mark of a true partisan moron. Someone who says "Dems love to do x". Democrats, like Republicans and indeed most large groups, are full of people who have a variety of opinions and attitudes. Generalizing them is a sign of stupidity.

Another myth. Conservatives don't spew hate on science, though they won't just accept something as fact because a lot of people say it.

Unless its saying that homosexuality is a choice, right Allie?

 

[Bern80]

No, but I would be interested too Snowman. Have a link?

RGS...you confuse having a generally accurate view of myself with having a large ego. As I said in another thread, intelligence is not the be all and end all of things. Its just another trait no "better" or "worse" than any number of other traits. I'm not a better person for it at all. There are many things I suck at. I am quite unartistic, unfortunately. I suck at football, baseball, and ballroom dancing as well.

The only evidence of this that any of us have seen is that you scored well on a test. Which is evidence of very little. That and your opinion which has almost no credibility given your argument style and arrogance.

 

[Larkinn]

The only evidence of this that any of us have seen is that you scored well on a test. Which is evidence of very little. That and your opinion which has almost no credibility given your argument style and arrogance.

Don't think to speak for the board, boy.

 

[Doug]

I am personally certain that if a valid survey of either educational level, or IQ, were done in the US today, that it would reveal a higher mean score in both for self-identified liberals as opposed to conservatives.

Before liberals feel too happy about that, they should also ponder the fact that a similar survey would also reveal the same difference between whites and Blacks.

And since most liberals have a well-developed excuse-and-explanation-mode for the latter, let them apply it to us poor stupid, rigid, authoritarian, ambiguity-fearing conservatives.

Society made us that way, boo hoo!

In fact, this fact about the relative intellectual score of Left and Right represents a historic reversal.

Until fairly recently, in historic terms, the Left was supported by those who had not been very successful in the ruthless capitalist competition. The poor, the industrial workers, small farmers. Whereas the Right was supported by those who had been successful: business owners, large and small; prosperous farmers; skilled workers; professionals -- the middle classes in general.

In much of the world, it is still that way.

And since education tended to track income, the more educated you were, the more conservative you tended to be, for economic reasons.

This assumes, of course, that the historic differences between Left and Right revolved around the Left's desire to use the power of the state to shift the economic balance in the direction of the bottom layers of society. Social strata tended to vote for their own economic interest, as they saw it.

Now that has changed in the countries where capitalism has been successful in lifting up the previously-poor and making them (or, more precisely, their children and grandchildren), homeowners and high school and university graduates.

And, at the same time, the old Left/Right differences have been supplemented (not supplanted) by "cultural" differences.

Many conservatives would be surprised to learn just how culturally conservative even the Left was, three generations ago. Now all that has changed.

The new middle classes want their personal freedom: to have sex before and maybe even outside of marriage and abort the occasional unwanted child, to experiment with drugs, to let their reason goeth where it listeth in matters spiritual, and their appetite to do the same in matters sensual ... in short, not to be judged.

Now for the educated middle class, the consequences of this are not necessarily disastrous.

I know people who experimented rather extensively with drugs in their youth, and who are today prosperous businessmen who use only the socially-approved drug, alcohol.

I know several women who became single mothers, and their children are now grown up and pursuing respectable careers. (Who knows what psychological deficits there may be as the result of not having a father-figure, but on the outside, they seem no worse to me than other children I know who had two parents.)

Widespread atheism and agnosticism do not seem to have driven the Oxford and Harvard and other university faculties to acts of desperate wickedness. (Returning student essays late, it is reliably reported, is done by the Godless and God-fearing professor alike.)

But the further you go down the social scale, the less true this complacent observation is.

Drugs and single-parenthood on public housing estates, and among the poorer people in general, are an entirely different thing than they are among the chattering classes.

And people whose status is uncomfortably close to the bottom layers of society, and who can see, perhaps in members of their own family, the devastation that the breezy abandonment of traditional morality can cause, are likely to react against the "if it feels good do it" morality of the 60s.

Here is one cause of cultural conservatism among the "less-educated": they may not be able to bluff their way through a discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis or predict the next term in a geometric series, but they have seen with their own eyes what liberal social philosophy brings. And so long as they have a reasonable chance to advance economically, they are not so willing, as their grandparents were, to put more power in the hands of the redistributionist state, either. (Workingclass conservatism causes great puzzlement and distress among some liberals, who even write [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X/ref=sr_1_1/103-9655811-7155832?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192446155&sr=8-1] whole books [/ame] trying to account for the seemingly-irrational rejection by the workingclass of the liberal offer of world peace and free healthcare.)

[Note to my fellow conservatives: don't count on their allegiance as your birthright. Convince them that conservative economics really are just a way of making the rich richer while they stand still or slip behind, and you'll lose them, no matter how loudly we scream Gay Marriage!

Nor are they hostile to sensible welfare-state measures that do not appear to encourage irresponsible behavior.

And they are remarkably live-and-let-live, too, even on the sex issue. Frame conservatism as something that wants to positively enforce traditional -- read fundamentalist Christian -- morality via the state, rather than just defend it from ever-more-aggressive assaults by the Left, and we'll lose them. I know someone who switched her voting registration from Republican to Democrat after watching the freak-show of religious maniacs outside Terry Schiavo's hospital.]

But all this does not really address the main issue: if someone is smarter and better educated than someone else, then their political opinions must be better, right? After all, everything else being equal, smart is better than stupid.

So why not just take our cue from the really smart and well-educated people, our bona fide intellectuals?

The folly of doing this will be examined in a subsequent post, where we shall examine the political record of intellectuals in the 20th Century.

 

[midcan5]

Doug,

Harry Frankfort has a term for your post, but we are in polite company. You often read like a cliche that came out of Townhall or some wingnut think tank. Poor people, real poor people are the same now as always, they don't even vote unless some committeeman pays a driver to get them to the polls. Do they look back at the sixties as some sort of hedonistic welfare state, you have to be nuts to think that. Those people in Kansas you refer to are middle class not lower class or poor. I'm waiting with bated breath for the 20 century - I have my Peter Watson's 'the modern mind' on the shelf next to me in case I get whoosy. And only one bit of reality since you missed it completely - if it was live and let live then you need to figure out who is tampering with all those voting machines.

 

[Doug]

MidCan: I've had lunch with Peter Watson who indeed writes useful books, but I have never heard of Harry Frankfort. I didn't know he read my posts, whoever he is. (If he is inhibited from commenting because he actually thinks this Board is an example of "polite company" he must hang out with some very tough hombres indeed.)

As for whether I am just channelling Townhall or "wingnut think tanks" -- I wonder if you have ever read any of either? But in any case, each to his own taste.

And the rest of your post I find incomprehensible so I cannot respond. (Except to recommend a book where you will find extensive evidence on the Sixties' worldview and its differential effects on various social classes: [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Nightmare-Sixties-Legacy-Underclass/dp/1893554023/ref=sr_1_1/102-7125993-3436965?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192701718&sr=8-1]The Dream and the Nightmare: the Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass[/ame]. I highly recommend this one to those liberals, and I know there are many, who really care about poor people and how to improve their lives.)