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From the Water is Wet Files: Liberals (aka Hippies) Have Poor Hygiene
The Green Eyed Monster
i blame hip hopRegistered User regular
i blame hip hopRegistered User regular
This is from an interesting op-ed from William Kristof about some of the things which divide liberals and conservatives.
He offers the perhaps obvious, but I think still accurate, observation that our morals inform our beliefs, and not vice versa. He also goes on to note that the extent to which we engage with "the opposite viewpoint" isn't always as altruistic as we might believe:
Personally, I think it's important to understand that well formed conservative viewpoints, to which I am generally opposed, have understandable underpinnings. It's not just stupid preachers or weird fundies who have over zealously swallowed every word in the Bible, there are legitimately people who just have opposing moral systems which one can understand and engage. Until liberals understand this, the dialogue between the two sides will continue devolving in the final culmination of Karl Rove's greatest wet dream.
The extent to which the Left is blindly dismissive to many opposing viewpoints, and having lived in far left communites, I've definitely seen it, is just as unattractive to me as anything that comes out of your average Fox News blowhard's mouth. If the Left is going to claim a monopoly on rationalism and progressive thought, it would help to display some more of it.
He also links these sites, which might be fun to tool around with:
http://www.disgustscale.org/
http://www.yourmorals.org/
If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue?
How’s this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?
And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?
Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.
Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.
He offers the perhaps obvious, but I think still accurate, observation that our morals inform our beliefs, and not vice versa. He also goes on to note that the extent to which we engage with "the opposite viewpoint" isn't always as altruistic as we might believe:
Simply exposing people to counterarguments may not accomplish much, he said, and may inflame antagonisms.
A study by Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania found that when people saw tight television shots of blowhards with whom they disagreed, they felt that the other side was even less legitimate than before.
The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality. If you damage your prefrontal cortex, your I.Q. may be unaffected, but you’ll have trouble harrumphing.
One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.
Personally, I think it's important to understand that well formed conservative viewpoints, to which I am generally opposed, have understandable underpinnings. It's not just stupid preachers or weird fundies who have over zealously swallowed every word in the Bible, there are legitimately people who just have opposing moral systems which one can understand and engage. Until liberals understand this, the dialogue between the two sides will continue devolving in the final culmination of Karl Rove's greatest wet dream.
The extent to which the Left is blindly dismissive to many opposing viewpoints, and having lived in far left communites, I've definitely seen it, is just as unattractive to me as anything that comes out of your average Fox News blowhard's mouth. If the Left is going to claim a monopoly on rationalism and progressive thought, it would help to display some more of it.
He also links these sites, which might be fun to tool around with:
http://www.disgustscale.org/
http://www.yourmorals.org/
The Green Eyed Monster on
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Are we really to consider disgust, revulsion and upholding authority values to be placed on the same footing with fairness and harm prevention?
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Why is the onus on the left? You pointed out the weirdos on the right, the left has them too and they are just as much of a minority as the crazies on the right. The difference is we don't listen to our crazies as often nor consider them an indispensable part of the voting bloc to the point of self destructing the party.
Also our crazies usually chain themselves to trees or do crazy drugs instead of burning crosses. But whatever.
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To keep in this spirit: the Left coalition in the US is pretty fragmented along ideological lines. You've basically got a small group of progressives plus a lot of ethnic and labor interest groups. Few, if any, of these latter groups share a unified ideology. For instance: put a Green and a labor proponent in the same room and ask them to discuss gasoline taxes. Progressives are a relatively small group among the left.
In comparison, the Right coalition is mostly a union of strong ideological groups: neocons. Prolifers. Religious right. Neolibertarians.
For this reason, demanding interparty dialog is a strategy that typically benefits the Right, not the Left. The Right doesn't lose members to dialog - their strength is ideological unity to begin with. The Left, on the other hand - well, it tends to go like this:
Progressive: To the right, we say: We oppose corporate welfare!
Labor: Righto.
Progressive: So let's let GM fall over and die.
Labor: MAN WHAT
etc. Being a strategic coalition of interest groups means that, when it comes to ideological discussion, your best strategy is to point out how insane the other guy is and try and postpone your own internal faultlines until later.
...my answers to those would be the 'conservative' one and yet I'm pretty far on the left for numerous issues. Hell, I even know that public restrooms are statistically cleanlier than my private bathroom but I'm still going to line the seat with toilet paper.
Never mind that individuals political stances don't work that way. We are a series of contradictions.
Everything.
I guess this makes me a neocon bogeyman.
but I share joints a lot
so I guess it evens out.
The backwash, chiefly. Though I am not opposed to sharing fries and such.
William Kristol's conservative sense is tingling!
Yeah, saliva is pretty gross, germs or not. This is also why I am not as fond of kissing as I am other forms of physical affection, much to my wife's chagrin.
I think that's a sign of Libertarianism. Don't worry though, we're working on cures.
So they're more inclined to be irrationally afraid of the world around them and see it as contaminating their "pure", "clean" world?
...
The left's crazies don't tend to kill people.
You're bodily fluids are precious, this I can understand
Well, herpes. But you and the person you are sharing it with are probably already infected, so it's not that big a deal.
But I also vote liberal all the time.
So....
I'm not really "down on it", it's just not my favorite thing.
thanks... being jailed sucks, yet I spend so much time there...
I've tried to be concerned about who I share drinks with, but I really can't— because almost everybody I share drinks with I've kissed at some time or another.
Is that worse?
Depending on what you are drinking and how you are drinking it, the amount of saliva that gets backwashed into a glass is minute. Besides which, of all the places you are going to find germs, and well kept mouth has the least harmful. I will not be sharing drinks with just anybody, but I'm going to be more embarrassed by the mistake I made then disgusted by the fact that I just drank out of someone else's glass.
As for the OP, I find it odd that you claim that just the Left tends to be narrow minded and unwilling to listen to the opposing party. Both sides often do that, and it is normal. You have your ideals, and you are loathe to change them, its human nature. However, I actually tend to find Liberals more willing to talk and discuss, while the Conservative side tends to just go straight to "You don't know what you are talking about, you are stupid, shut up" or some semblance of that (I have actually been told almost exactly that by conservatives I know). This is by no means true of everyone in either party, they are both fully mixes of people willing to accept and listen to opposing view points, as well as people who shut out all opposing view points. You are going to find more people have a mix of both of these, and who's personality could be either party then you will find anything else. It is like what moniker said, we are a series of contradictions.
That depends. Are you okay with being a dirty, dirty slut?
Conservatives seem far more likely to be eating at the Waffle House. Which, frankly, is pretty much one of the least hygienic places you can eat and have to pay money.
So I kind of connected conservatism with a sort of "rough and tumble, down and dirty, Nascar" perception of life. Which is less hygienic.
Seriously, though, Waffle House. Christ. On the other hand, a degree of obsession with personal hygiene (like I have) can be construed as paranoia. I don't think I'm paranoid.
But, seriously, Waffle House. People actually know is absolutely disgusting, and that's the point--apparently to build up your immune system.
liberals btw are the middle class folk who have enough money that they can find time to be offended by almost everything, but not so much money that they become power-crazed dragon-people hunched over their hoards of wealth rubbing coins on their genitals
You sir are a Prophet.
I don't know anything about Waffle House, but the best kinds of food I have ever eaten have always been from hole in the wall joints. Especially Mexican food.
It is because those people are folk. They live honest lives and they make honest food.
I don't think that's the same thing as the Waffle House. Before I came to the United States, I used to eat at noodle stands/dumpling vendors constantly. Back when I was new to it, I didn't mind buying onion rings from vendors in Manhattan.
I'm fairly certain the Waffle House, in most (not all, but most) scenarios deliberately keep their establishment dirty and filth-ridden, despite otherwise operating as a normal fast-meal vendor. I guess it's part of the ambiance. It must work: here in the Bible-Belt, you get plenty of coservative middle-class people who own enough iPods and MacBooks to clearly to able to afford to eat somewhere cleaner, but don't.
Given that they are middle-class or even bourgeois (like myself), they go for the same reason they watch Nascar: it is a cultural mainstay, and they are bored.
The Bible-Belt is weird. The food, provided you stay out of the Waffle House, is quite good though. Unhealthy as sin, but quite delicious. I won't say good. It is delicious. I say this as someone who made the transition to American life like a car making the transition to stop against a concrete wall.
There is so much I have yet to learn about being an American, all these years later. Being a leftist back home was so much easier. Especially since you didn't even have a political party.
Or perhaps "botfly-chewed hole in the carcass of whatever made the hole in the wall".
As far as mexican joints go, I've got some pretty nasty food poisoning that way. I've been a lot more conscientious about where I eat because of stuff like this... so I guess that means I'm a freak of political affiliation, I guess.
And no, I wouldn't slap one my parents across the face no matter what the context. I don't really see that question as having a great deal to do with your political affiliation unless they're assuming liberals are all raised by granola-eating Berkeley caricatures who encourage their children to vent their Freudian frustrations through interpretive dance, primal screaming and (apparently) parental punch-outs.
Yeah, pretty much.
The OP actually got the author of the article wrong, it is Nicholas Kristoff, not William Kristoff/Kristol. But yes, I could certainly see this kind of asinine stuff come out of Bill Kristol who was forever memorialized by the Daily Show as "Oh Bill Kristol, are you ever right?"
Most curious. I took the test from the OP and I ranked fairness, harm, authority, loyalty, purity in descending order. Purity and loyalty were both sub 1.0. I really am a dirty liberal. The conservative values of purity, loyalty (especially mindless patriotism), and unquestioning subservience to authority seem more like flaws than strengths to me.
Enforcement of your standard of purity on others leads to oppression. If it doesn't affect you, ignore it. Unquestioning obedience to a corrupt authority is what allows the authority to abuse it's power. Patriotism, to quote Samuel Johnson "Is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Even when I was in high school I remember being disgusted by "pep rallies" and people mindlessly cheering on their own team and demonizing the neighboring school. So utterly stupid and pointless.
The paranoia about drinking out of a friends glass is comical to me though. Unless they have herpes I wouldn't be the slightest bit concerned. We have immune systems for a reason.
probably the worst I've been burned in my life man. that smarts.
For the sake of humor, I would probably give my father a smack. I wouldn't my mother, but she is considerably smaller than I am. She, and by extension, myself, both came from a culture that puts a great emphasis on respect for elders--on the other hand, she pretty much hates her mother, and has no problem expressing that. Plus, she by her own admission dislikes most forms of physical humor.
My father, I'd have no problem with. I wouldn't mind him smacking me either, provided he didn't surprise me with it--he does love surprises. Over the years, we've engaged in no shortage of somewhat cruel humor, primarily his idea (my sense of humor isn't as good). If we'd both agreed to it, I don't really see what the problem is.
I remember once my father threw a temper tantrum at my place of work, screaming at me during my shift, in front of all my co-workers (he's prone to emotional outbursts, like his own parents were, reportedly). That evening, I waited until he was he was trying to sleep and confronted him, and informed him if he ever did it again, I wouldn't hesitate to punch his lights out after wards, in private--at his age, it would be pretty easy. He got the message--after all, that's how he'd disciplined me when I was a child. A lot of people seem to think of that as some sort of cardinal sin against your parents, but we saw it as a form of mutual respect: I disciplined him like he disciplined me. I guess that's my hippie liberal peaking through.
And like most prophets, completely wrong (although he shares this piece of conventional wisdom with many people). When you control for education, the poorer you are the more likely you are to vote Democrat. The richer you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican. Which isn't a perfect liberal/conservative tracker, but is a pretty good approximation.
More to the point, are you OK with the fact that 68+% of the US population has herpes? I mean, on the one hand, that puts your odds at 2/3 you've already had it and it doesn't matter. On the other hand, if you belong to that 32%...