, Subject= "Communist is not the opposite of Conservative." | Communist is not the opposite of Conservative. rev.03.23.2006 | Back to Lessons |
"Communism is NOT the "opposite" of Conservatism [or "synonymous with Liberalism"]."
from the article:
Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.
At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.
The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.
Jeff Greenberg's reply to the study described in the article:
"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.
Um, Jeff? I wouldn't exactly accuse the bastions of Communism of historically having been the least dogmatic, most flexible, least defensive group we've seen in a while. Take North Korea as an example. Very Communist; very rigid, very poor, very closed, very paranoic [what the hell do they have that we'd want??], and so on. Same for the mainland Chinese, the Viet Nam Communists and likewise the Communists of Cambodia, etc.
All of them have been about the least "easy-going" or "hang-loose" kinds of people that history will ever document, and they are the kinds that American Conservatives have opposed the most strongly during at least my lifetime. Yet you say that ..... well, hell, you've really got me confused now.
Let's take a look now...
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