You do know what facetious means, right?

mabey he can clean rachel’s house or something.

To say that a political affiliation is a “complex mental phenomenon”, may be the dumbest thing I’ve seen posted here since Philosopher Jay was posting FNC’s numbers from last year comparing them to this year. Unbelieveable…

You may have heard the statement that liberalism is mental illness, but there is now scientific evidence that conservatism is a complex mental phenomenon.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/13/usa.redbox:

****

“A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity”.

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report’s four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them “preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality”.

***

Here is the study: http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf
It is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the nature of fascism and conservatism.

Here is the conclusion of the study:

“We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system
that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational
concerns having to do with the psychological management of
uncertainty and fear. Specifically, the avoidance of uncertainty
(and the striving for certainty) may be particularly tied to one core
dimension of conservative thought, resistance to change (Wilson,
1973c). Similarly, concerns with fear and threat may be linked to
the second core dimension of conservatism, endorsement of inequality
(Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Although resistance to change
and support for inequality are conceptually distinguishable, we
have argued that they are psychologically interrelated, in part
because motives pertaining to uncertainty and threat are interrelated
(e.g., Dechesne et al., 2000; McGregor et al., 2001; van den
Bos & Miedema, 2000).
In conclusion, our comprehensive review integrates several decades
of research having to do with the psychological bases of
political conservatism. Most of what is known about the psychology
of conservatism fits exceedingly well with theories of motivated
social cognition. The integrative framework developed here
has implications for resolving historically controversial issues, and
we have argued that it has great generative potential for guiding
future work on the subject of conservatism. By attending to the
multiple, potentially reinforcing influences of epistemic, existential, and ideological motivations involved in political conservatism, we hope that future research strengthens understanding of belief systems in general. It should also shed light on the nature of relations between the micro and the macro, that is, on the reciprocal dynamics between the needs of individual and group actors
on one hand and the complex characteristics of social and political
systems, institutions, and organizations on the other.”
***

Hopefully more studies like this will come out so that eventually a warning label may be put on shows produced by News Corp, warning that they bear no relationship to reality and are bad for your mental health or perhaps, News Corp will be dissolved as a dangerous criminal conspiracy to society. It produces a very potent mixture of racism, ignorance,intolerance, fear and hatred that, in my opinion, damages the individual human personality.

I’ll try to keep plotting my ‘Big Mouths’ chart over longer and longer periods of time. If anything interesting pops out at me I’ll let everyone know and perhaps make the charts available.

We all know what FNC’s numbers are, so I won’t embarrass anyone by repeating them here.

Countdown was back up just over a million. I missed it. Who wss hosting?