Liberal self-deception

Digging deep into the psychological well of self-deception and ‘comforting lies’ liberal researchers have announced that their ’scientific’ research proves that liberals (surprise) are smarter and more adaptive than conservatives.

I believe this falls under the rubric of a serious failure of objectivity. What’s more, it should call into question everything else these researchers have ever done. Serious bias.

Are liberals smarter than conservatives?

It looks that way, according to a study published this week in Nature Neuroscience. In a rapid response test—you press a button if you’re given one signal, but not if you’re given a different signal—the authors found that conservatives were “more likely to make errors of commission,” whereas “stronger liberalism was correlated with greater accuracy.” They concluded that “a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change.” ~slate.com

Brilliant study. Surely not biased at all, eh?

What is so intriguing to me about the stated conclusions of this ’study’ is what it actually measures… Nothing. It certainly doesn’t measure political ideology, thinking patterns, or even attitudes– and on the surface it actually seems to convict liberals of mindless aberation, of being flexible to the point of meaninglessness.

But I percieve a different interpretation altogether. Given instructions to only press a button on the right cue they do it more accurately. Doesn’t this mean that they are more likely to follow instructions? Meaning that in fact they are MORE conservative and unlikely to deviate from what they are told to do? In essence all this study proves is that liberals are more likely to be mindless robots who follow orders no matter what.

Self-deception for propaganda purposes

This isn’t the only news item of this nature to appear in the last few weeks. It appears that the left needs some bolstering in the intellectual self confidence area. But ironically all it will do is reinforce already closed and entrenched liberal minds.

To disguise and attempt to use their scientific positions to advance their own political propaganda is the definition of bias. Something I no longer find surprising in leftist acedemic circles. But then you have quotes like the following from an academic study:

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.

This research marks the first synthesis of a vast amount of information about conservatism, and the result is an “elegant and unifying explanation” for political conservatism under the rubric of motivated social cognition, said Sulloway. That entails the tendency of people’s attitudinal preferences on policy matters to be explained by individual needs based on personality, social interests or existential needs. ~berkeley.edu

I’m not sure what kind of liberalism these researchers are measuring but it seems to me that the kind of socialism most of today’s liberals are promoting is actually a return to an idealized past.

Tags: 21st century socialism, anti-intellectuals, idiotarians, leftists, liberals, the left