There is already abundant evidence that liberals are smarter than conservatives. Bill Moyers noted that “many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths.” He was of course referring to the neanderthal conservatives.
No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. Partisans in particular – and the audiences for Murdoch’s Fox News and talk radio – are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinformation. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he “may be the antichrist.”
But maybe they can’t help it. One possible why conservatives are stupid is they are born that way. Science Daily has an article which concludes that “atheists and liberals” are just plain smarter. Politics is a function of IQ. “Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as ‘very liberal’ have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as ‘very conservative’ have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.”
The most moronic of all are those who believe in God, because as it turns out, belief is just a manifestation of paranoia.
“Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”
In contrast to the conservative clench, liberals are adaptable. They are comfortable with Change, they are more relaxed. In a study, conservatives showed a distressing tendency to press buttons reflexively like monkeys. By contrast liberals were more considered and adaptable in their responses, acting like proper human beings.
NYU’s David Amodio, a professor of psychology and the study’s lead author, and his colleagues recorded electrical activity from the brain using electroencephalograms (EEGs) in people who rated themselves as either conservative or liberal. During these recordings, subjects had to press a button when they saw a cue, which was presented often enough that the button-press became habitual.
However, subjects occasionally saw another, infrequent cue signaling them to withhold their habitual button press. When such response inhibition was required, liberals had significantly greater neural activity originating in the anterior cingulate cortex, a portion of the brain known to be involved in conflict monitoring. Liberals were also more likely to withhold their habitual response when they saw the infrequent cue.
Now evidence is emerging that conservatives truly are different. They are disgustingly fat. KC Dermody, writing in Yahoo argues that most fat people tend to live in Red States.
USA Today reported the highest obesity rates per state, and it’s not surprising that of the top 10 states with the highest rates of obese residents, nine tend to be red or conservative states based on the 2008 election results.
Republicans have referred to the unemployed as lazy and they often call those who believe health care should be a given right to all Americans “socialists,” in addition to a number of other ridiculous monikers.
These Red States are blot upon the landscape, inhabited by uncouth, gun-toting people who drive around in trucks and snarf down too many fried pies.
With escalating health care costs and the rising costs of health insurance, this is a serious issue. What bothers me is it is mostly conservatives who seem to be staunchly opposed to health care reform and it is conservatives who continuously rant about how liberals want to spend, spend, spend.
I wonder if they’ve considered the highest obesity rates are attributed to the most conservative states? As stated by Reuters, expanding waistlines are also attributed to more gasoline use. We’re burning “nearly a billion gallons of gasoline more a year than if passengers weighed what they did in 1960.”
It is unsurprisng then that Jacob Sullum fears that the next big public policy question will be: “Is Your Flab Imposing a Burden on Society?” There emerging evidence that a new crisis is threatening America, the threat of presenteeism. In contrast to absenteeism, presenteeism is the being altogether too present in the shape of a heaving mass of corpulence.
“As economists put a price tag on sky-high body mass indexes,” Reuters reports, “policymakers as well as the private sector are mobilizing to find solutions to the obesity epidemic.” The story lumps together all sorts of obesity-related costs, without regard to who pays them or why. It worries that people have to buy more gasoline to transport their bloated bodies, for instance, and it says the lower wages earned by obese women amount to “a $76 weekly obesity tax,” although these costs are borne by fat people themselves and therefore hardly count as externalities justifying government intervention. Reuters likewise counts the cost to employers of obesity-related absenteeism and “presenteeism” (reduced productivity), although businesses can take such costs into account when deciding whom to employ and how much to pay them (which could help explain the relatively low wages of obese workers). But mainly Reuters worries about obesity-related medical costs, citing a recent study that puts them at $190 billion a year in the United States, more than twice as high as previously estimated.
Imagine the disgust of the liberal human at having to work beside the barely sentient and corpulent conservative whose only lifeline is the goverment health care that he is too stupid to accept on paranoid religious grounds! Who doesn’t even know what is good for him. The answer to that problem which public policy is slouching toward, Sullum argues, is more government control over what people eat and how much they should exercise. That will be expressed in a fat tax and food police.
But of course they had it coming. And anyway it means the beautiful over the ugly; the smart over the stupid; the truly human over the barely evolved. If God existed truly then why did he make conservatives? The least conservatives can do is pay their taxes and eat their arugula. Turn liberal and turn on.
To Serve Man
I am the very model of a modern enviro-liberal,
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.I’m very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern enviro-liberal.
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