Instead of taking this day to reflect on the Inauguration and the eminent change facing us, how oh-so different everything is going to be, and every other overstated bit of hopeful drivel with which the internet is still a-buzzing, I'd like to muse on my relationship with the outgoing president.…
According to this 2001 edition of The Onion, God has clarified His Commandment: "Do not kill." Here's an excerpt: "I don't care how holy somebody claims to be," God said. "If a person tells you it's My will that they kill someone, they're wrong. Got it? I don't care what…
Nor is it primarily the result of a rational choice (i.e., a systematic analysis of facts) that liberals become liberals.
We’d like to believe that we adopt our political views rationally, only after careful consideration of the “facts.” That’s a pipe dream, however. Jay Dixit’s article, “The Ideological Animal,” (published by Psychology Today) demonstrates that our political persuasion takes root well before the cerebrum kicks fully into gear. There are deep triggers that lead individuals to crave one political ideology over the other. For many of us, rational thought is post-facto justification. As David Hume famously argued,
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
Dixit’s arguments dovetail with Hume’s beliefs. As Dixit argues,
We tend to believe our political views evolve as a result of rational thought, in that we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we’re not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, and personality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear.
What else correlates with political leaning? You won’t be surprised at some of these differences:
…conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and
We all knew it, but the details are now pouring in. It's all so very reprehensible . . . This is an excerpt from today's Washington Post: In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and…
I bristled yesterday as I read yet another faux-controversy concocting article in my misguided home town paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You see, Body Worlds is coming to my town and the morality “experts” are getting restless. The “concern” is that maybe we shouldn’t be staring at dead bodies. The morality experts quoted…