There is a new study from UC Berkeley, located in a loony town which opposed the US war against the Afghanistan. According to the study common psychological factors associated with political conservatism include:
- Fear and aggression
- Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
- Uncertainty avoidance
- Need for cognitive closure
- Terror management
Shanti has a good rebuttal for this and says
As you can see if you care to read the gist of the study, any study that compares Hitler, Mussolini and Ronal Reagan and says they were basically the same, you should be able to smell a huge rat. When there are aberrations to the study of course, like Stalin and other commie dictators, the study glosses over it and say they were conservative too. How fun! I thought that the hard-left ties itself into knots trying to tell us all what a ?worker?s paradise? Cuba is and how good socialism and communism are for us, if we would only listen.
Oooh I am frightened and need some cognitive closure.
Comments (2)
not only that, you are avoiding uncertainty by labelling the left-wing "loony" - if you were a liberal, you would have called them "bigots" instead ;)
Posted by Shanti | July 30, 2003 6:58 AM
Posted on July 30, 2003 06:58
This line is comical
"Ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material - which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common threads, Glaser said."
As a mathematician I would enjoy seeing their calculations. The whole conservative, liberal, progressive labeling seems to me to have lost all meaning and these sorts of things are one of the reasons. One can make a argument that Regan was conservative in that he believed in right and wrong as well as many other things based on Judeo-Christian values. At the same time he was pretty radical. His ideas on economics, nuclear deterrence, forcing the soviet union in economic suicide via SDI (which.. unlike maybe so of the others things I am saying here does indeed seem to be a specific plan he came up with himself) etc.
Either way I personally get bored with these sort of discussions. What makes me angry though is that anyone could either in passing or by intent compare any of our presidents to Satlin or Hitler. Last time I checked none of our Presidents lead a coup or revolt (seems pretty radical and not very conservative) and then killed millions of their own people to reinforce their control over the government.
Posted by robi sen | August 1, 2003 11:22 PM
Posted on August 1, 2003 23:22