Conservatives v. Liberals

[Gregg]

Was it? It was really just an observation of my FB page. Dissension has always existed here.

Yes it has.

That said Mith, Mith, Mith. You know I have been an RJ friend through thick and thin. You have in past times started stuff and played the innocent. You knew exactly what you were doing when you posted this. As far as observation from your face book page we will have to just take you word for it as well as considering how you are filtering it.

One thing you did accomplish. Some of the others that gave you heat in the past are now in your corner.

I would say as your RJ friend, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!! Well done.

[Mithrandir]

Yes it has.

That said Mith, Mith, Mith. You know I have been an RJ friend through thick and thin. You have in past times started stuff and played the innocent. You knew exactly what you were doing when you posted this. As far as observation from your face book page we will have to just take you word for it as well as considering how you are filtering it.

One thing you did accomplish. Some of the others that gave you heat in the past are now in your corner.

I would say as your RJ friend, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!! Well done.

Thanks Gregg. But you're really off base with this post. I set out to accomplish nothing.

[swampdragon]

Yes, that is very true. I have worked at Universities my entire adult life and non-tenured conservatives have to be closeted or very careful. We just had a conservative professor here slip up and send the engineering list Serv an email in response to a black engineering society dinner, "please let me know when the white dinner is." He has faced very heavy criticism from our president on down. It has come out that he does talk about his Trump support and views on immigrants a lot in his classes that have nothing to do with politics, but he probably feels like if he were liberal he wouldn't be getting this backlash. And he probably felt the need to send that email and to talk politics in his classes, because there is no denying the majority of his peers and students are more liberal than he is, and he wanted to push back on them. (To that, I'd respond to him that universities, like most employers, are antognistic to any and all sentiments that bring them negative press or alienate segments of their client base, which his unnecessary email did).

There are some vocal conservative voices on campus, but I suspect, unfortunately, that most moderate conservative do stay closeted. Only the more extreme and tenured ones seem to speak out, and when they do, they don't do the silent, moderate, reasonable ones any favors, as the above case indicates. If they did speak up in a nuanced way on some hot button issues, they'd probably get lumped together by their peers with the few more extreme few that do rail against the largely leftist environment.

I will also say that even though I label myself liberal, I've read some extreme academic works that make me feel like a conservative in comparison to them, or at least make me cringe. It is extreme and certainly not the norm for all academics to think this way, despite what conservative pundits say, but there are fringe left arguments that I think do no favors to the progressive agenda, and alienate many moderate allies to good, progressive causes, because they suggest being privileged (white, male) is essentially a crime one must always atone for, but never really atone enough for (again, most arguments that point out the facts of institutional privledges are more nuanced). I emphasize that such radical positions are mostly overblown and oversimplified, but I guess it is fair to admit such fringe ideas exist on the very far left, since I'm bashing far right ideas. Still, it does seem to me that many many times more people listen and agree with the far, far right drivel you are wise enough to avoid than the maybe handful of people in the world that read and buy into the extreme left craziness of some obscure texts that gets over hyped or oversimplified by right winged media.

At the university level but at the public education high school and younger nowhere near as much. Many of the liberal teachers keep their mouths shut for fear of backlash from the parents or community.
For example intelligent design (creationism) isnt a thing to teach in higher education because well; it isnt a thing, but there are communities where it is being taught

[Teenwolf]

Any argument that uses Facebook as it's primary source material for an argument is too weak for me (regardless of the apparent truth in the statement). Let's stick to reputable sources and studies, as to avoid personal conflict and unnecessary personal offense.

Did anybody see this recent study about Conservatives and Liberals and how their brains function differently? The key finding is that conservatives are primarily motivated by fear, and this finding is backed up by physiological evidence in the different ways conservative and liberal brains are constructed.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-t...hology-2017-10

Several studies have shown that when social scientists get liberal-leaning experiment subjects to think about their own deaths or make them feel threatened, some left-wingers adopt more conservative values. This phenomenon played out after 9/11 — researchers found that there was a "very strong conservative shift" in the US after the attacks, with more liberals supporting Republican President George W. Bush and favoring increases in military spending.

The hypothesis social scientists developed about this effect is perhaps best summed up in a 2003 review of research on the subject: "People embrace political conservatism (at least in part) because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity; and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals," it said.

There's evidence that this fear plays out in how conservative and liberal brains are shaped, too. Researchers have taken brain images of people with different political leanings and found that those who self-identify as conservative have larger and more active right amygdalas, an area of the brain associated with the expression and processing of fear. A 2011 study looked at MRI scans of self-described conservative young adults and found they had more grey matter volume in the right amygdala than their liberal counterparts. In 2013, another team of scientists expanded that research to show that conservatives generally have more activity in their right amygdala when taking risks than liberals do.

[Mithrandir]

I wasnt gathering primary source material for a thesis or professional article, i was simply making an observation about my FB page. Thats all it was.

[Ken]

Regardless of motivation, I think the obvious takeaway is that this says much more about your personal facebook page (which is not really relevant to others), than it does about any concrete, political viewpoint.

[B-Fly]

Kurt is a self described liberal atheist. I might have a problem with a few of his view points even if I agreed on some others.

As am I, but I think the article successfully distinguishes between mainstream religious belief and observance, on the one hand, and (other forms of) magical thinking or essentially baseless conspiracy theorizing, on the other.

[Gregg]

As am I, but I think the article successfully distinguishes between mainstream religious belief and observance, on the one hand, and (other forms of) magical thinking or essentially baseless conspiracy theorizing, on the other.

I might have a problem with a few of your viewpoints even if I agreed on some others.

Nice to have you back.