The shock doctrine was one of the best presentations I have ever seen! I am also working my way through all six and will send them to all of my friends over the weekend.
But there is one thing you Canadian's have simply got to change, so the liberals in other countries can understand each other-lol.
She kept referring to "neo liberal's" for conservatives. Bad word. Neo cons, or conservatives, or "right wingers"-lol is a much better definition for this reason. It is very confusing to everyone outside of Canada. How can a liberal be a conservative, using websters definitions of liberal and conservative-lol?
I am sure you Canadian folks have an explanation, but I have yet to figured it out.
If one uses the English dictionary, it defines liberalism as open minded and progressive thinking and conservative as, well, conservative. To conserve, such as, to conserve the status quo of norms and mores and culture.
And in the US we have divided ourselves almost completely now into either liberals or conservatives and never the twain shall meet. We speak right past each other, having no comprehension of the others thinking. To be honest I am not sure how democracy will survive this?
The United States Senate does not have one liberal left in the republican party. And the democratic senate has all liberals and a few moderates. No true conservatives.
1/2 of the democratic party, pre 1964, used to be conservative because that was the union party. And the south depended greatly on unions. But after the 1964 cvil rights act the conservative south cut off their nose to spite their face.
They hated integration (hard to believe) so much, more than they wanted job security, and since then, the south has voted as a block for Republicans in every southern state. Teh south used to vote as a block for democrats.
The Republicans then, immediatley set about systemaically destroying the unions the south depended on for fair wages and treatment from corporations. The south still hasn't figured that out!
And so we humans are learning, as our culture evolves, that we seem ot be divided into two subspecies of sorts. And besides the nurture part of liberal and conservative (which seems to be divided by education mostly); there also seems to be something fundamental (nature part)in our two different ways of thinking.
And the reason, IMO, that we have only a two party system, as it reflects two primaryily different ways in which the human species processes information. One learned and one born with.
So Nature and nurture, conservatives and liberals are not as contradictory as one might think. We can understand the nurture part of the differnce, but ther also seems to be a genetic part. which I have suspected for many years.
The research posted below shows that conservatives, think much like an uneducated person might think about complex social theory. So that is why the two populations overlay, and imitate each other. One is learned and the other is in the genes. IMO.
One can also see this unconscious awareness of the differences between consevative andliberal thinking on talk shows i.e. a liberal is always paired with a conservative and vice versus.
Red brain, blue brain
September 10th, 2007 @ 10:33 am by Andy
A study published over the weekend in Nature Neuroscience shows that “liberals” and “conservatives” show some differences in brain activity during decision making, according to the authors.
Students in the study were fitted with a cap to measure electrical activity in their brains and shown a stream of Ms and Ws on screen. They were supposed to press a button if they saw a particular letter, but only given fractions of a second to do so. The researchers were looking for activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain involved in decision making.
Students who self-described themselves as liberal did slightly better (34 mistakes out of 100) than conservatives (44 out of 100). The conservatives were more likely to push the button regardless, while the liberals spent longer considering it.
There is a sort of “hold on here” alert in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain wave seen just before people successfully resist pushing the button. And there’s a “whoops” response afterward if they get it wrong, a brain wave that comes once people realize they’ve pushed that darn button when they shouldn’t have. That signal may also be associated with learning from our mistakes.
Both responses were consistently stronger in the liberal students and weaker in the conservatives. When it goes overboard, stronger or weaker activity in the anterior cingulate cortex can be big trouble.
People with high activity there can be anxious, and in the worst case, obsessive-compulsive, unable to let things go, said Dr. Cameron Carter, a UC Davis psychiatry professor whose cognitive neuroscience research often focuses on that region of the brain.
People with low activity there are “undersocialized,” with less empathy for others, Carter said. In the extreme, they are psychopaths.
Carter, who reviewed the Nature Neuroscience study at The Bee’s request, called it “quite solid,” with sound methods and robust results. (Andy’s note: Carter was not otherwise involved in the study, which was done at New York University and UCLA.)
In Carrie Peyton-Dahlberg’s story in the Bee, some political operatives (mostly Democrats) are amused. While the authors are, by the sound of it, at pains not to make value judgments, coauthor John Jost told the Bee that there are other studies that support the idea of different personality types being drawn to different political viewpoints.
Conservatives tend to be conscientious, consistent and structured, while liberals lean toward open-minded, creative and messy, Jost said in an e-mail. He believes this new research may be the first to also document different activity in a specific area of the brain.
John J. Pitney Jr., a government professor at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California who has worked for the Republican National Committee, makes the sensible point that “Liberals and conservatives are, I think, equally prone to making mistakes.”
The study also involved a relatively small number of subjects (43) from a relatively narrow group (college students at NYU and UCLA).
One commenter on the Bee’s forums wonders where libertarians would fall on the test (ask the commenters at Reason magazine). In fact, one of the problems here might be that political views occupy more than one dimension — they’re just jammed into that in a two-party political system. Are political descriptions (which are local to the U.S.) a proxy for more universal personality traits?
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