Mitt Romney doesn't want to be discriminated against on the basis of his personal beliefs. He wants it so bad that he decided to badmouth all people who don't give homage to invisible supernatural sentient beings: As expected, [Romney's] speech itself was a delicate tightrope walk. He evoked the patriotism of…
Marty Kaplan writes about big problems with our political primary system: What I'm trying to get at is the stupendous sense of powerlessness among our citizenry that our current political system has created. It's as though the best democracy can do is to cough up this beast that we're being…
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
In brief: Chris Comer, director of science curriculum, was pushed out after she sent an e-mail promoting a local talk by the author of "Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design". Comer merely sent a notice about the talk as an "FYI." The School board tried to claim that…
It's that time of year again, when we gear up for the rewards (or disappointments) promised in our celebrations of the Yule Season. Christmas Time! Days of saccharine movies, maudlin songs, a hope for fluffy white snowfall that is somehow miraculously easy to drive through and falls only on grassy…