It’s Furious Balancing

I’ve been avoiding the blog, and it’s not because I’m knee-deep in yarn from the Shop Hop last weekend.   Well, I am knee-deep in yarn, but the Blogging Avoidance is because I’m utterly speechless at the galloping stupidity from the so-called, oxymoronic “liberal media” ¹ and the Repugnant Cretins Republicans, who, for the purposes of this entry, I’m defining as “people who are daft enough to support the presidential and vice-presidential candidates their party has thrown up — and I do mean vomited in this instance — for the 2008 general election.”

I can’t even write one paragraph — albeit a very wordy one — without my jaw clenching.  I think if I were to enumerate all the ways Caribou Barbie Sarah Palin is not qualified to be anything more than a small town mayor, if that, I would break my teeth.

I surf the Innernets a great deal.  I read blogs and opinion pieces from the (minority) Liberal Media.  There’s a lot of anti-McCain/anti-Palin writing out there, but the one that gave me pause this morning was Judith Warner’s column/blog post in the online version of The New York Times. She cites an interview with Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view.  Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

I rattle on about the stupidity of the Repugs, but Haidt argues that it is the Liberals who are damaged by their own blindness.  How, he posits, “can Democrats learn to see — let alone respect — a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?”

Haidt’s article, What Makes People Vote Republican?, is worth the time to read and worth the time it took for me to go to the dictionary to refresh my memory on the definitions of anomie and heuristic. ²  I easily can place myself in two of the five moral foundations he sets forth to define overall morality — harm/care³ and fairness/reciprocity — but I measure up on the low-end of the scale for the other three — ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.  I’m a selfish, godless, insubordinate malcontent as far as the conservatives are concerned.⁴

Because I love graphs and charts, here’s my test results from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire at www.YourMorals.org (registration required).  You need to click the image to see it properly; my blog post formatting skillz aren’t on today.  My score is green, self-identified liberals are blue, and self-identified conservatives are red.

I would suggest taking the test before reading Haidt’s article; it could skew your results.

Being the open-minded Liberal that I am, thinking about “How the Conservatives Think” gives me a lot of food for thought about my own definitions of morality.  I can attempt⁵ to stand in the shoes of a conservative and see how he/she defines morality, too.

My knee-jerk disgust at the conservatives, however, makes me think that they themselves are incapable of exploring their own relationship with morality.  Sorry, cats and kittens, but I have issues⁶ with people who live their lives with the Orwellian concept of “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,”⁷ or, as the Yarn Harlot posted recently:

It is the interpretation of those [basic rules that almost all faiths and all good people have in common] that defeats me.  Stuff like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” being interpreted as “Thou shalt not kill unless you happen to think that the other person isn’t really a person because of your own rules” or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you unless you think that simply being a human isn’t a good enough reason to receive human rights” is a problem for me.

Yeah, that’s a problem for me, too.  /sigh

* * * * *

1. Let’s get this straight at the get go — the true Liberal Media is a minority; the vast part of what passes as “news” today is along the lines of Fox New, which is nothing more than a Republican propaganda machine. [↩]
2. It also has me itching to find out why grasshoppers are kosher and most locusts are not, but that’s one of my “Oh, Look! A Shiny!” Innernet moments and I’ll save that research for later today — if I’m not distracted by something else, that is. [↩]
3. Protecting individuals from harm and caring for the most vulnerable. [↩]
4. Must be the effect of all those lattes. [↩]
5. Note the use of the word attempt — I never claimed I was able to do it, but I will try to do it. [↩]
6. I also have issues with lying sacks of shit and murderers Dubya and his cronies, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms. [↩]
7. George Orwell, Animal Farm. [↩]

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.