Researchers Claim To Be Able To Determine Political Leaning By How Messy You Are 592
According to a study to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, you can tell someone's political affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Conservatives tend to be neat and liberals love a mess. Researchers found that the bedrooms and offices of liberals tend to be colorful and full of books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia. Their conservative contemporaries, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials. Their bedrooms and offices are well lit and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags — especially American ones. Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, says these room cues are "behavioral residue." The findings are just the latest in a series of recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. I, for one, support a woman's right to clean.
Left and Right priorities. (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to make sense to me, conservatives in my view have always been about protecting and preserving the America's physical assets and wealth, where as liberals conversely tend to put ideals above the nation's power and prosperity.
and just for the record in case it matters to anyone. I tend to view myself a somewhat left leaning moderate.
Pop psychology (Score:2, Interesting)
This sounds like pop psychology to me. Is this journal an "A pub?" Is it even a high B? Funny how the description was spun to make leftists look vital and engaging, while conservatives are portrayed as pedestrian or even boorish.
I'm a staunch small-L Libertarian (which to leftists is indistinguishable from a conservative) and my home is usually quite neat and tidy. But in most other respects the description of a "liberal" abode matches mine. My home is filled with books, music, art, musical instruments, nice furniture, and two cats. I suspect that if one of the people behind this supposed study were to enter my home, they'd assume I was a leftist, at least until they started peering over the titles on my bookshelf.
I will say this however, the leftists where I work do tend to be the most messy, even slovenly in some cases.
The way I see it, the way that someone deals with the environment under their control says a lot about them. If someone can't even manage to keep their own space functional, then how can they handle the other aspects of life? People who take responsibility for themselves tend to embrace ideas derived from the concept of personal responsibility. People who avoid taking responsibility for themselves will embrace ideas that downplay or go against the concept of personal responsibility. So it isn't surprising that people who can't manage to take responsibility for their own living and working spaces would be most likely to embrace a philosophy that tells them they shouldn't have to.
Re:absurd (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. This is pretty much stereotyping. My Office is well lit and messy, filled with a wide variety of CD's from "Folk" to "Classic and Modern Rock". I have books about Feminism, books about Religion (As well as books that define religions...Bible, Koran), books with maps, books about socialism, books about objectivism, books about capitalism, books about United States History, books about Biochemistry, Books about Immunology, a few dozen computer reference books, books about existentialism, books about metaphysics, fiction books of all sorts from Star Wars to the Classics. I have several pieces of travel memorabilia including a small American Flag that was given to me at the Vietnam War Memorial. I have a piece of sports memorabilia hanging up. I have a calender and a book of stamps. Heck, I just sewed a button back onto a pair of pants so I have sewing materials still laying out. My office also has the only closet the wife allowed me for my clothes, thus it also has a clothes hamper.
So what am I? Apparently someone with Multiple Personality Disorder or something.
Re:Pop psychology (Score:5, Interesting)
I have neatly organized piles of mess. (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't want Obama, I have convinced myself he is a socialist, which is fine, but I don't want that.
Errrrr, *gosh*, I don't really want McCain either. He's (R) but not a conservative. I'd trust his foreign policy, but his domestic policy would be some smarmy mish-mash of capitalist and socialist ideas that would get all fubar and result in just as much misery as I think Obama domestic policy would.
I learned much too late that I really, really, liked Ron Paul. *snuffed*
So now I'm thinking, Bob Barr? He seems like a reasonable second to Ron Paul, but I don't know if I care for his VP. I'd honestly rather have Palin in there.
Slashdot and Digg and all the high-tech Web 2.0 destinations are vibrant with Obama supporters, God love 'em. I wonder why these communities are so tilted that way?
To those folks, I'm still seeking an answer to a problem which has been troubling me throughout the campaign: All the nations' leaders who are in an adversarial relationship with us have publicly and openly voiced support for Obama, and continue to wish him well for the election. Is it possible to despise tyrants like Amadinejad and Chavez, but still root for an Obama victory alongside them? I keep asking myself what it is about Obama that makes dictators such as they want to give him their support? If Amadinejad comes to our United States and condemns the life all we Americans have worked so hard for (for generations) in front of the UN, and then proceeds to encourage us to vote for Obama, what exactly is the "change" which he's expecting to get? I am frightened at the prospect that in Obama, people like Mamoud and Hugo see someone whose governing policy is more aligned with theirs, and would push America in the directions which Iran and Venezuela have gone.
I think most of our fine and earnest citizens of Iranian and Venezuelan heritage would say that such an alignment and transformation would be a terrible thing, and would be in keeping with the values and opportunities which motivated them to come here and become fellow Americans (please speak up and don't let me speak for you).
I'm fiscally conservative, and socially libertarian. I don't approve of the actions our gov't has taken with respect to creating this crisis, or the actions now purported to try to solve it. Free markets and deregulation were not to blame, because the market was not free to start with. Subsidy distorted it and disconnected, for the financial segment, the risk-reward relationship of a naturally free, open, and transparent market. Mostly Dems inflated subsidy, and mostly Repubs removed "select" regulations and clouded transparency. Both types of manipulation are contra to a free market. Hopefully the damage will end up being minimal, but we are eerily following in lock-step with the fiscal and social game plans which took a devastating, but short-lived stock market downturn, and transformed it into a crushing depression.
I believe that as an American, you are free to do what you will in your own private life. Whatever lifestyle you choose. Tempered with personal responsibility and respect for your neighbors.
Freedom doesn't mean free-for-all, which is an ironic sort of tyranny in itself. The highest degrees of freedom carry also the highest responsibilities. I want the freedom to act in my own self-interests, and I accept the responsibility to do right by my neighbors when decided when, where, and how to enjoy any particular freedom. But I want it to be my choice.
Our modern popular culture I think realizes the responsibilities necessary to grab hold of, but increasingly does not want to shoulder its burdens. The rationalization is that less true freedom may not feel soo great, but abdicating the burden of responsibility more than makes up for that loss. That kind of carefree "feels" better. Or, so such the culture believes.
My wager, is that such is a fools bargain. Carefree != freedom. Is there a harm in trying it? Yes, I believe there is,
Re:Heh, not so sure (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Conservative tend to scare easier (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:American libertarians (Score:5, Interesting)
I also find it hilarious how people conflate libertarianism and Objectivism. Ayn Rand hated libertarians, primarily because she made the same mistake that everybody and their dog makes about libertarianism: she failed to realize that it's not a philosophy. Libertarianism is and should be a simple system of government that only deals with matters of harm (physical or financial) between persons. It doesn't make value judgments about actions outside of that spectrum, because it's not the role of a libertarian government to say whether it is better or worse for an individual to devote their lives to curing cancer or jerking off to porn. Because libertarianism wouldn't take any kind of stand on what man should do (only what man shouldn't do), Ayn Rand thought it was a weak and spineless philosophy, consequently missing the point that it wasn't a philosophy in the first place.
As highly as I think of Ayn Rand, she basically doomed Objectivism when she said that anybody who didn't believe exactly as she did couldn't call themselves an Objectivist. (This is not hypocrisy in the context of my first paragraph. There are reasonable and unreasonable degrees of interpretive difference. Lutherans and Baptists have interpretive differences but they're both Christian. A muslim couldn't reasonably call himself a Christian even if he argued about the role Christ has in the Quran. It's a subjective matter of symantics to some extent.) Particularly ironic and inconsistent considering that she herself wrote about the value of evolving philosophies and the fallacy of the pursuit much less the attainment of perfection. This has resulted in stagnancy by design.
London Mayoral Elections (Score:5, Interesting)
We used an interesting system here in London to pick our mayor: Your ballot has two columns - your first choice and your second choice. You can't vote for the same person in both.
The idea is that the votes from everyone's first column are totalled up. If nobody gets more than 50% of the vote, they eliminate all but the top two candidates. They then add to each candidate's total all of the votes for that candidate in the second column. The winner is the one with the highest total from both columns combined.
In practice what this means is that you vote in column 1 for the candidate you'd really prefer, even if he has no chance of winning. You vote in the column 2 for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning and whom you don't mind too much.
Applied to the national elections in America, it would mean that the greens could all vote for Nader safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't result in a "lost vote" for the Democrats. And libertarians could vote for Paul.
The beauty of such a system is that the final result would be a better reflection of the electorate's will (Gore would have won, for instance), and the true extent of minority candidates' support would also be more obvious, so those candidates would have a bigger influence on the election - for instance, they might not fall foul of the 15% "viability" standard required to participate in the debates. And in the long run, it's just possible that a third party might break the stranglehold of the Dems and Reps.
Am I crazy, or is this idea worth exploring in America?
Right wing conservative retard speaking. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Heh, not so sure (Score:2, Interesting)
Because a free man who works gets paid and gets to decide what to do with that money.
A slave who works gets room and food, but isn't free to choose to get money in his pocket to do what he wants for instead.
Taxation is money that you've earned but don't have the freedom to decide how they will be spent.
So the less taxes you are forced to pay, the more freedom you have over the resources you've earned and freedom over the resources you've earned is one imortent aspect of freedom.
Plus, the less taxes you pay, the less money the government has to do stupid things with, like sending troops to kill people in foreign countries or overcrowding prisons with people for victimless crimes, so it actually gives you more freedom in two ways.