"In line with previous scientific knowledge on the relative rigidity of rightist ideological beliefs, the first three studies illustrate that induced emotions have a greater influence on leftists' positions than on rightists' positions, even though the experimental manipulations affected levels of emotion similarly for all participants. Even the third study, in which a negative emotion was induced, led to changes in policy support only among leftists, as was the case with empathy in the first two studies. Induced empathy toward both Palestinians (study 1) and asylum-seekers (study 2) led to increased support for conciliatory and humanitarian policies among leftists, whereas induced despair (study 3) decreased support for conciliatory policies only among leftists.
Studies 4 through 6 looked at real-world scenarios, and found that Jewish-Israeli leftists' policy support was more related to both empathy and anger than rightists', at times of both peace efforts (study 4) and war (study 5). The final study found the same pattern of results with regard to fear among a different population, demonstrating that the interactive effect of ideology and emotion on policy support is not limited to a given population nor to emotions typically associated with leftist ideology.
Ms. Pliskin and her colleagues believe that these results may apply to other cultures, including liberals and conservatives in the U.S. "We would expect to find similar results among rightists and leftists in other cultures, including conservatives and liberals in the U.S., because of the cross-cultural similarities in the superstructure of ideology and the needs associated with rightist versus leftist ideology--and because of how these factors relate to emotional processes and their outcomes." But Ms. Pliskin does caution that more research would need to be done to determine if there are cultural factors that may limit or increase observed left-right differences."====http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...110314.php
I would stipulate that the study is incomplete because it emphasized primarily empathic emotions. I think negative emotions play a bigger role among conservatives--emotions like anger, disgust, fear, and moral blame. The teapartiers fear big government. The gun nuts fear being a victim of a crime or government tyrrany. The nativists judge illegal immigrants as immoral and inferior. The anti-gay groups harbor disgust and hatred against people due to their sexual orientation. The nationalists fear other nations like China and Russia. Capitalists fear poverty and socialism. It's still emotions here, only not those of compassion and altruism.
The body does not perceive anything. The eyes do not see. The hands do not feel. The ears do not hear. They have to be constructed as perceiving inside the brain. The body has to be constructed as conscious by the brain. But by itself it is little more than an unconscious machine being affected by external stimuli. Think about your eye for a second. All it's doing is focusing light on your retina. But the retina doesn't "see" this light. It isn't like some magically conscious surface that visualizes the image inside of itself. It is little more than cells that are being electrically stimulated by light. Like the leaf of a tree or a solar panel. But electrical stimulation of retina cells isn't seeing. It's all happening in the dark at this point, a stream of impulses waiting to be visualized as a scene inside the brain. The same is true for the nerves in your hand. The hand is not a conscious "thing" that feels the things it touches. The hand is not even "there" as a passive receiver of stimulation until AFTER the brain locates it as an attached extension of an identified-with body. THEN and only then does the hand SEEM to be feeling the outside world like it had awareness of its sensations independently of the brain. The mind constructs the body as a sort of animistic machine that is a subjective and passive experient of the world, situated in a landscape sensorily accessible to it yet simultaneous to it. In reality, and to the brain, it is nothing but a construct translated out of the machine language of varying electrical impulses.
"When we look at the world around us, we do not, as a rule, see "changes in light flux over time." We see solid objects moving and standing still in a well-defined three-dimensional space (at least, that is what we see in the most focused, central area of our vision). Nothing would be visible, however, were it not for the "light flux" entering our eyes through the pupil and flowing over the photosensitive cells lining the back of our eyeballs. Experiments have shown that when the retinal cells receive a steady, unchanging light, when the stimulus is absolutely fixed and unvarying, the cells quickly "tire." They stop sending the information our brain needs to construct the visual world we see lying in front of our eyes.[20] Thus there has to be a "flux," a movement of light over the retinal cells; otherwise, we see nothing at all. (If the sources of light do not move, the eye's own movements will keep the light moving across the cells.) "All eyes are primarily detectors of motion," R. L. Gregory points out, and the motion they detect is of light moving on the retina.[21] Only by these changing patterns of illumination can the world outside our eyes communicate with the visual processes of the brain. From that communication emerges our visual world."===http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebook...nd=ucpress
"A 52-year-old Ferrari just smashed the record for the most expensive car ever sold at auction.
The 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO, with a somewhat dark past, was just sold by Bonhams for $34.65 million. That blew away the previous record, held by a Mercedes-Benz racer that sold last summer for $31.6 million including auction fees.
"The market right now is just so strong," said Marcel Massini, a leading Ferrari historian and adviser to collectors. "And this is one of the big prizes in the entire collecting world."==http://www.cnbc.com/id/101914056
EXCERPT: [...] There are overwhelming empirical data revealing, to anyone who is willing to look, complex social organization across the animal kingdom, including collective deliberation, division of labor, ritualized conflict resolution, and other forms of behavior that, when identified in human society, are deemed political without hesitation. We know that elephants plan elaborate raids on human settlements to recover the remains of their slaughtered loved ones. We know that in ant colonies the appearance of elaborate systems of task-allocation is related directly to the size of the colony: just as in human society, the more individual members of the society, the more we may expect to find social differentiation. Thanks to the primatologist Frans De Waal’s popular work, we are now slowly warming up to the idea that there is such a thing, at least, as “chimpanzee politics.”
These are just a few examples from recent science, and to some extent they build on what we have known all along but have preferred not to see. Aristotle himself reports accurately on elephant intelligence and social behavior in the “History of Animals”; in the “Georgics” Virgil gives a fairly solid account of the goings-on within beehives. Yet the combined force of ancient wisdom and recent science will still not do much to convince the skeptic, who interprets all empirical evidence of animal politics as pointing only to structures in the animal world that are homologous to what we see in human society, but that still do not share that magical je ne sais quoi that makes human society what it is. What we do as human beings when we deliberate, or love or cooperate, in this line of thinking, animals do only in an imitative or counterfeit way. They only “deliberate,” “love” or “cooperate” — in scare quotes.
But there is another way of understanding animals as political that even the most defiant human-exceptionalist cannot dispute: not as separated out into their own discrete political societies, each according to its kind, but rather as part of a single, global political formation that includes, notably but not exclusively, human beings. Some recent political philosophy, in fact, is starting to approach its subject from just such a trans-species perspective. In their groundbreaking 2011 book, “Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights,” Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue compellingly that animal rights theory has been limited to the extent that it has emphasized only negative rights of animals, a category that is conceived as universal and without any distinctions of moral significance within it. They argue instead that theorists would do well to focus on relational obligations that human beings come to have to animals that figure in different ways in human society. For them, nonhuman animals belong to the polis, too. [...]
EXCERPT: [...] After Naked Lunch was published in 1959, Burroughs graduated from unknown writer to literary celebrity. Today he is widely regarded, along with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as one of the three towering figures of the Beat movement. He was one of the most prominent figures in the emergence of the postwar counterculture, and his influence stretches well beyond the Beats to the bohemias of the '60s, the '70s, and beyond. In 2014, a century after his birth in St. Louis, his work remains a touchstone for alienated cynics of all kinds.
Burroughs' worldview was miles from the peace-and-love socialism that our cultural clichés tell us to expect from a hippie hero.
In 1949, according to Barry Miles' new biography Call Me Burroughs, he complained to Kerouac that "we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism."
When he was a landlord in New Orleans he sent Ginsberg a rant against rent control, and when he found himself owning a farm in Texas he gave Ginsberg an earful about the evils of the minimum wage.
Eventually he departed for Mexico, and there he wrote to Ginsberg again. "I am not able to share your enthusiasm for the deplorable conditions which obtain in the U.S. at this time," he told his leftist friend. "I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England, and not too different from Russia....At least Mexico is no obscenity 'Welfare' State, and the more I see of this country the better I like it. It is really possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you." He added that Westbrook Pegler, a hard-right pundit who would soon be a vocal defender of Sen. Joe McCarthy, was "the only columnist, in my opinion, who possesses a grain of integrity."
[...] Two decades later, covering the Democratic Party's bloody 1968 convention for Esquire, Burroughs manifested a more left-wing aura. [...] "This is a revolution," he wrote in a 1970 article for the East Village Other, "and the middle will get the squeeze until there are no neutrals there." Still later in his life, he would identify "American capitalism" as his foe, specifying: "the American Tycoon...William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil."
So had the aging artist shifted from the far right to the far left? Not exactly.
Burroughs' hostility to the police was a constant throughout his career. In that same letter to Ginsberg that praised Mexico for not being a welfare state, he added this nugget: "Here a cop is on the level of a street-car conductor. He knows his place and stays there." And when Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road described a lightly fictionalized version of Burroughs, it declared: "His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops."
The hostility to corporate monopolies had been there in the early years too, with Burroughs displaying a particular fondness for conspiracy tales in which big business suppresses inventions that threaten the bottom line.
And the young Burroughs' hatred of the New Deal liberals who held power in North America didn't keep him from embracing the anti-feudal, anti-imperial liberals he encountered in South America. In Colombia he even gave his gun to a guerrilla boy. "Always a pushover for a just cause and a pretty face," he wrote to Ginsberg in 1953. "Wouldn't surprise me if I end up with the Liberal guerrillas."
[...] Burroughs was no conventional conservative. As a bisexual, a drug user, and a writer whose work was regularly damned as "obscene," he came to regard the right as a gang of bigots and busybodies. But he was no conventional radical either. His anti-authoritarian vision cut across the normal categories of left and right. "At the present time," he said in The Job, "we are all confined in concentration camps called nations. We are forced to obey laws to which we have not consented, and to pay exorbitant taxes to maintain the prisons in which we are confined." As an alternative, he called for consensual communities that "break down national borders."...
ARTICLE: There's more to the decline of the once mighty ancient Assyrian Empire than just civil wars and political unrest. Archaeological, historical, and paleoclimatic evidence suggests that climatic factors and population growth might also have come into play. This is the opinion of Adam Schneider of the University of California-San Diego in the US, and Selim Adali of the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Turkey, published in Springer's journal Climatic Change.
In the 9th century BC, the Assyrian Empire of northern Iraq relentlessly started to expand into most of the ancient Near East. It reached its height in the early 7th century BC, becoming the largest of its kind in the Near East up to that time. The Assyrian Empire's subsequent quick decline by the end of the 7th century has puzzled scholars ever since. Most ascribe it to civil wars, political unrest, and the destruction of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, by a coalition of Babylonian and Median forces in 612 BC. Nevertheless, it has remained a mystery why the Assyrian state, the military superpower of the age, succumbed so suddenly and so quickly.
Schneider and Adali argue that factors such as population growth and droughts also contributed to the Assyrian downfall. Recently published paleoclimate data show that conditions in the Near East became more arid during the latter half of the 7th century BC. During this time, the region also experienced significant population growth when people from conquered lands were forcibly resettled there. The authors contend that this substantially reduced the state's ability to withstand a severe drought such as the one that hit the Near East in 657 BC. They also note that within five years of this drought, the political and economic stability of the Assyrian state had eroded, resulting in a series of civil wars that fatally weakened it.
"What we are proposing is that these demographic and climatic factors played an indirect but significant role in the demise of the Assyrian Empire," says Schneider.
Schneider and Adali further draw parallels between the collapse of the Assyrian Empire and some of the potential economic and political consequences of climate change in the same area today. They point out, for instance, that the onset of severe drought which, followed by violent unrest in Syria and Iraq during the late 7th century BC, bears a striking resemblance to the severe drought and subsequent contemporary political conflict in Syria and northern Iraq today. On a more global scale, they conclude, modern societies can take note of what happened when short-term economic and political policies were prioritized rather than ones that support long-term economic security and risk mitigation.
"The Assyrians can be 'excused' to some extent for focusing on short-term economic or political goals which increased their risk of being negatively impacted by climate change, given their technological capacity and their level of scientific understanding about how the natural world worked," adds Selim Adali. "We, however, have no such excuses, and we also possess the additional benefit of hindsight. This allows us to piece together from the past what can go wrong if we choose not to enact policies that promote longer-term sustainability."
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