You see where I am going, if you read this blog often. I circle.
Again: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26481-left-or-rightwing-brains-disgust-response-tells-all.html
Dis-gust=inedible=unclean=dirty=wrong. What they have measured is the extent to which conservatives and leftists differ in their gut level responses to various stimuli.
If I find the spectacle of two men kissing disgusting, is that wrong? Well, we are told it is. We are told we have to learn to suppress that natural response–I would argue it is a natural response, as it is hard to see how evolution could have selected for at least exclusive homosexuality, although I suppose I could see some adaptive advantages to bisexuality–and instead express acceptance. What do we do? We SUPPRESS.
Killing babies. Well, I think we are wired to protect our own kind, at least our close kin, and to protect the most helpless in our group. Babies are nearly completely helpless, and embryos ARE completely helpless. It is small wonder that many would find the idea of reaching in, pulling out, and killing–if the shock of removal was not enough–that little proto-baby. What do we have to do to toe the orthodox leftist line that it is not a baby but a de facto removable organ of a woman’s body she can choose to want or not want? We have to SUPPRESS that natural protective instinct.
This is how you get things like this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/08/emily_letts_filmed_her_abortion_to_inspire_women_but_can_the_procedure_really.html
Letts tells us, “I talk to women all the time, and they’re like, ‘Of course everyone feels bad about this. Of course everyone’s going to feel guilty,’ as if it’s a given.” She says, “I don’t feel sad. I feel in awe of the fact that I can make a life.”
And, of course, facilitate and film the TAKING of a life.
Personally, I am not a hard core anti-abortionist. I support education and access to birth control. Above all, though, I support children growing into responsible adults who are both capable of preventing pregnancy, and retaining a sense of horror at the idea of killing a baby. Our current President supported an Illinois bill in which full term babies could be born, and then simply left in the cold to die, and then be discarded as medical waste. There is something fundamentally disconnected about that.
This is my point. I think one possible measurement would be something adumbrated in the movie “The Parallax View”, and attempted in a preliminary fashion by those measuring political brains, which would be to measure reactions to images which we could reasonably assume would be dis-gusting for most people. Dead bodies, feces, etc.
And of course this sort of thing was PRECISELY what Sade was interested in. 120 Days of Sodom is filled with little sketches, little ideas, static images (partially forced by the fact that Sade was in prison and forced to hide his manuscript). One of them was taking a bath in blood, feces, semen, urine and menstrual blood (I think that is the right inventory), and calling it good.
The leaves on trees turn color in the fall because they are dying. Can we not imagine that the fascination with the dis-gusting arises precisely when access to that sense is gone or dying? That a fascination with death is tied precisely to a sense one is dying or dead? Could we not find brain-eating zombies in here somewhere?
Life is complex. I mean this in both senses of the term, which is to say “hard to understand”, and formally “complex”. You cannot necessarily build stronger bonds of human understanding by prohibiting judgement and that expressed sense of pre-rational revulsion we call bigotry. As I say to the point of being monomaniacal and profoundly dull, leftism does not renounce judgement or violence. It does not renounce hate or bigotry. It simply reserves it for those ACCUSED of those crimes, who in most cases are completely innocent. Does any sane human being really think opposition to Obama is race-based, or that racism is a major problem for more than a very small fraction of our populace? Of course not: lunacy is common on the left. It is the only thing which propagates it.
I was reading the other day both about how the Irish competed with blacks in the numbers in which they were brought to the Americas as slaves, and in the discrimination they faced. Most Irish slaves seem to have wound up in the Caribbean, but they were slaves, no question. They were “bred”–and I think this is the term that was used–to create higher value slaves. They were esteemed lower than blacks, who were considered hardier.
Then after the potato famine, they came to America voluntarily, but were faced with pervasive discrimination, as in the short, because common and commonly understood, acronym NINA: No Irish Need Apply.
No civil rights activists intervened. No pro-Irish campaigns were ever waged by the government. But they integrated. Most major cities now have Saint Patrick’s Day parades.
The same thing would have happened with African-Americans, if they had been left alone, left to negotiate their own way as countless individuals. But they had the profound misfortune to have Jesse Jackson and Al sharpton and Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama inflicted on them. And that’s before I get to the vastly larger number of whites who USED them both to advance their careers, and to create a sufficient illusion of a conscience for themselves that they could sleep at night in their large mansions, “knowing” they were the good guys and gals.
Enough for now.