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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (260532)	9/14/2014 6:36:27 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542155

There are piles of studies now that show they respond very differently to stimuli. I'm not sure how you can ignore that. When the first studies came out- 10 years ago or so- I could understand, but now there are lots of confirming studies.

To: JohnM who wrote (260532)	9/14/2014 7:51:38 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542155

This is worth a read, to understand conservative thinking: members.shaw.ca RWA = right wing authoritarians - from page 55 Authoritarian followers score highly on the Dangerous World scale, and it’s not just because some of the items have a religious context. High RWAs are, in general, more afraid than most people are. They got a “2 for 1 Special Deal” on fear somehow. Maybe they’ve inherited genes that incline them to fret and tremble. Maybe not. But we do know that they were raised by their parents to be afraid of others, because both the parents and their children tell us so. Sometimes it’s all rather predictable: authoritarians’ parents taught fear of homosexuals, radicals, atheists and pornographers. But they also warned their children, more than most parents did, about kidnappers, reckless drivers, bullies and drunks--bad guys who would seem to threaten everyone’s children. So authoritarian followers, when growing up, probably lived in a scarier world than most kids do, with a lot more boogeymen hiding in dark places, and they’re still scared as adults. For them, gay marriage is not just unthinkable on religious grounds, and unnerving because it means making the “abnormal” acceptable. It’s yet one more sign that perversion is corrupting society from the inside-out, leading to total chaos. Many things, from stem cell research to right-to-die legislation, say to them, “This is the last straw; soon we’ll be plunged into the abyss.” So probably did, in earlier times, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, sex education and Sunday shopping. Thus it turns out in experiments that a person’s fear of a dangerous world predicts various kinds of authoritarian aggression better than any other unpleasant feeling I have looked at. As my mentor, Brewster Smith of the University of California at Santa Cruz, said when I told him that fear set off authoritarian aggression more than anything else, “We do have to fear fear itself.” And of course fear rose in the United States after 9/11. As Dave Barry put it in a column in November 2004, “Attorney General John Ashcroft has issued one of those vague, yet at the same time,unhelpful federal terrorism warnings that boil down to: ‘Be afraid! Be very afraid!’” Events like the attacks of 9/11 can drive large parts of a population to being as frightened as authoritarian followers are day after day. In calm, peaceful times as well as in genuinely dangerous ones, high RWAs feel threatened. They have agreed on the RWA scale, year after year since the 1970s, that sinfulness has brought us to the point of ruin. There’s always a national crisis looming ahead. All times are troubled times that require drastic action.

To: JohnM who wrote (260532)	9/16/2014 12:01:39 AM
From: Alex MG	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 542155

really? Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, etc etc etc... all these crazy wingnut extremists, warmongers, anti-social sociopaths, liars, and religious nut-wacks rooting on armagheddon, and various racists and bigots, just have "different political opinions, but they are just like me"?... good lord... jebus christ on a stick