Reporters Without Borders ranks the US, which loves to talk about its freedom, as 47th in the world. Woohoo! We're 47! Wait a second, though. Last year, we were 20. What happened?
Something to do with the number of journalists arrested while covering Occupy Wall Street protests. Shame on them. Shame on me, for being so unpatriotic about this.
“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.”
― Robert Anton Wilson
Take this statement:
In a series of experiments, researchers closely monitored physiological reactions and eye movements of study participants when shown combinations of both pleasant and unpleasant images. Conservatives reacted more strongly to, fixated more quickly on, and looked longer at the unpleasant images; liberals had stronger reactions to and looked longer at the pleasant images compared with conservatives.I'm trying to reconcile this with my own screwy history. I'm essentially a "glass is half-empty" type of personality, so by that criterion, I should be a conservative. In fact I was, but a number of years ago, I got totally fed up with what "true" conservatives had done to the Republican party, and I switched my allegiance to the Democrats. The way things are now, I doubt that I would ever vote for any Republican ever again.
Then comes what I assume is a new hypothesis:
UNL political scientist and co-author John Hibbing said the results might mean that those on the right are more attuned and attentive to aversive elements in life and are more naturally inclined to confront them. From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense, he said.How does this notion of conservatives confronting a threat square with their head-in-the-sand approach to climate change? Or evolution?
The results also are consistent with conservatives' support of policies to protect society from perceived external threats (support for increased defense spending or opposition to immigration) and internal ones as well (support for traditional values and being tough on crime), Hibbing said.
From my point of view, I see the flat out denial of overwhelming scientific evidence as a major threat to our future existence and our standing as a scientific power. American conservatives' support for their policies is more akin to a fundamentalist Taliban approach.
I'm glad, at least, that the researchers used a term like "perceived external threats" to categorize conservative belief. Perhaps they need to study the basis for a conservative's perception. Their blue sky is not the same color as my blue sky.