A bit lengthy, but interesting read

[badrose]

http://www.city-journal.org/html/rea...nce-14782.html

[CitizenBBN]

Just getting into it but I'd call this an OUTSTANDING read and find, thanks.

One small sample:

Social psychologists have often reported that conservatives are more prejudiced against other social groups than liberals are. But one of Haidt’s coauthors, Jarret Crawford of the College of New Jersey, recently noted a glaring problem with these studies: they typically involve attitudes toward groups that lean left, like African-Americans and communists. When Crawford (who is a liberal) did his own study involving a wider range of groups, he found that prejudice is bipartisan. Liberals display strong prejudice against religious Christians and other groups they perceive as right of center.

That's so very true. Liberals are absolutely just as closed if not more so to other non-conforming groups, you just have to pick the right groups. They think it's on the basis that those "other groups" are close minded, and never notice the contradiction.

I look forward to finishing the piece, but I have to do a bit of work first.

[CitizenBBN]

Another great example, showing the inherent bias in academic research that creeps in everywhere (though these are pretty blatant examples). IN that world simply disagreeing is a sign of something being wrong, when all it is really a sign of is not accepting their dogma.

Conservatives have been variously pathologized as unethical, antisocial, and irrational simply because they don’t share beliefs that seem self-evident to liberals. For instance, one study explored ethical decision making by asking people whether they would formally support a female colleague’s complaint of sexual harassment. There was no way to know if the complaint was justified, but anyone who didn’t automatically side with the woman was put in the unethical category. Another study asked people whether they believed that “in the long run, hard work usually brings a better life”—and then classified a yes answer as a “rationalization of inequality.” Another study asked people if they agreed that “the Earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them”—a view held by many experts in resource economics, but the psychologists pathologized it as a “denial of environmental realities.”

[badrose]

DRUDGE has got it going on.