Study shows conservatism = fear in the brain

Thanks. Interesting reading.I'm skeptical of the "hard wired" part.Well, actually, I'm skeptical of the whole thing. But it does make for an interesting read.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Yes, I would favor that."Conservatism" names a rather broad and complex spectrum of views. It will probably turn out to be impossible to find a basis for all of them.There is one fairly common, but not universal thread. And that is the tendency of conservatives to follow authority. But you might also find that tendency in the extremes of left wing politics. The people who prefer to think for themselves tend to be somewhere in the middle.It would not surprise me to see indications in brain structure that are correlated to "thinking for one's self" vs. "following authority." But the hard question will be whether that brain structuring had an innate cause, or is the result of the brain's adaptive development to support the kind of behavior that the person follows.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You have taken "somewhere in the middle" to be a position of compromise. That's not at all what I intended. Rather, I was talking about being pragmatic, as contrasted with being highly ideological.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Obama is a pragmatist. Do you really see him as a liberal ideologue?

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

And here I had thought, from context, that the thread was specifically about socons rather than about real conservatives.I'm wondering who is confused.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie