Maryland Blogger alliance
The Maryland Blogger Alliance
Deep Thinking on the Left and Right Coasts
Study claims to have found differences between the brains of liberals and conservatives.
Some Deep Thinkers at NYU and UCLA have decided, based on very thin evidence, that "political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information." Inferring much from a very simple experiment, the Thinkers have decided that political Lefties are wired differently from political Righties. One might suppose this research to be the precursor to another study that will reveal a genetic difference between the two extremes. Of course, none of the Thinkers have been asked to account for the fact that many, MANY people reverse their political affiliations completely, and that except for a pathological and loudmouthed minority, most people become more "conservative" with age.
Quoting the LA Times,
Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. [That's mighty "white" of him.] The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said. [For example, when driving a motor vehicle, balancing a checkbook, putting on eye makeup, and a thousand other mundane tasks...]
And yet liberals come unhinged over something that can never be proven to have significance.
University of Maryland police on Monday were investigating as a possible hate crime what appeared to be a noose hanging in a tree near a building that houses several black campus groups.
The noose — a throw-back to the days of lynching of blacks in the U.S. South — was found between the student union and the Nyumburu Cultural Center, where organizations that include the Black Faculty and Staff Association and the Black Explosion newspaper are based.
"We are starting out with the assumption that it was a hate crime," campus police spokesman Paul Dillon said Monday.
Witnesses reported seeing the 3-foot-long (1 meter) rope Thursday. The rope had a 3-inch-diameter (7.6-centimeter) noose tied at one end and was reportedly 10 to 12 feet (3.7 meters) up in the tree, Dillon said.
The rope was destroyed by campus maintenance workers before police had a chance to see it, Dillon said. But the department has photos and several witness accounts.
University President C.D. Mote Jr. said in a weekend statement over the weekend that the discovery was "of great concern."
"The possibility that this act appears intended to bring to mind the horrific crime of lynching, which is such a terrible and tragic part of our nation's past, is particularly abhorrent," Mote said.
If you Google some other stories about this non-event, you will find a photograph of the "noose," which appears to be nothing more or less than a well-tied slip knot. One wonders how the maintenance workers "destroyed the rope." More likely, they simply untied the knot! Since maintenance workers found the "noose," Occam's Razor would dictate that the investigators ought to start by asking said maintenance workers whether they'd been doing any tree-trimming in the past few weeks. When you are lowering branches from a tree being pruned, it's not unusual to use a rope with a slip knot tied in it.
But the [superior?] liberal minds of the Deep Thinkers at U of MD have come completely unhinged, on absolutely no evidence. And the way the modern spin machinery works, no amount of evidence will now suffice to DISPROVE that this was a "hate crime."
It would be a distraction to observe that a student newspaper calling itself The Black Explosion might be a bit inflammatory, and that someone on the newspaper staff might even be ambitious enough to have created a little hoax here. So I won't make that observation.
Ironic, isn't it, that the University president is a man named "Mote," which as a common noun means a tiny speck of dust?