Fear can be useful with respect to decisions like, say, whether or not to chase a bear with a stick, but for higher-level thinking the frightened state of mind blows goats. People do irrational, stupid, senselessly violent things when motivated by fear.
Naturally fear has its political uses. Steering a frightened public towards a stupid policy is, so to speak, frighteningly easy. When terrorists attacked America a normal leadership would have gone out of its way to reassure people and calm nerves. The GOP went the other way, maybe disgracefully, but in naked terrorist fear Republicans found a winning meal ticket at a time when national polls put them on the wrong side of virtually every issue.
Anyhow, on the topic social science that we should probably leave alone but due to some personal flaw just can’t, here are two more editions of science revealing what we already know.
First, an unpleasant surprise frightens conservatives more than liberals.
[Subjects] were attached to equipment to measure skin conductivity, which rises with emotional stress as the moisture level in skin goes up. Each participant was shown threatening images, such as a bloody face interspersed with innocuous pictures of things such as bunnies, and rise in skin conductance in response to the shocking image was measured. The other measure was the involuntary eye blink that people have in response to something startling, such as a sudden loud noise. The scientists measured the amplitude of blinks via electrodes that detected muscle contractions under people’s eyes.The researchers found that both of these responses correlated significantly with whether a person was liberal or conservative socially. Subjects who had expressed a high level of support for policies “protecting the social unit” showed a much larger change in skin conductance in response to alarming photos than those who didn’t support such policies. Similarly, the mean blink amplitude for the socially protective subjects was significantly higher, the team reports in tomorrow’s issue of Science. Co-author Kevin Smith says the results showed that automatic fear responses are better predictors of protective attitudes than sex or age (men and older people tend to be more conservative).
To be honest this result is so un-novel that it’s almost a tautology. One basic definition of conservatism is a negative reaction to whatever is new and shocking at a given point in time, whether the problem du jour is interreligious marriage, interracial marriage or gay marriage. Social progress generally involves accepting things that shock most people who see it for the first time relatively late in life. The liberal deals with his shock and gets over it where the conservative internalizes his discomfort and transforms it into a Kantian moral imperative. Finding out that unpleasant surprise impacts the conservative more strongly therefore beats reporting that the sun will come up in the east tomorrow, but not by much.
On the other hand, it’s curious to find that disproving rightwing lies only makes them believe it more.
Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.
A similar “backfire effect” also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.
In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.
Now you know why Atrios calls them “zombie lies.” But on reflection ‘zombie’ still doesn’t cover the perversity of this phenomenon. In most movies a zombie will go down if you hit it in the head hard enough. Rightwing lies aren’t just hard to kill, they get stronger the more thoroughly you kill them. Wingnut rumors function more like that mythical critter that grew two heads every time Hercules cut one off, except even the hydra eventually died. By comparison about 29% of America continue to think that Saddam had a WMD program and sat down with bin Laden to plan 9/11. In that sense the hydra is a piker next to rightwing stupidity. There’s nothing like it.
tofubo
i was thinking of the beast from the origional hellboy (kill one, two get created…)
but, it’s more like V
Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.
only, they don’t get the point of the movie, they think it’s an actionable plan that has merit
(creedy’s philosophy, not eveys)
sphex
A fascinating TED talk that highlights *more* research showing the same basic pattern.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
NonWonderDog
Oh, man. I don’t think I could get through that without laughing my ass off at the absurdity of it. That’s supposed to frighten people? “Leaping bunny, kitten playing with yarn, daisies in spring, BLOODY FUCKING DEAD GUY!, litter of golden retriever puppies, hamster eating baby carrot.” Wait, what?
r€nato
I would find the 2nd study more persuasive if they had also taken a group of self-described liberals and presented them with a similar liberal factual challenge to a preconceived notion.
Otherwise, you’re simply stating the blindingly obvious: people tend to reject information which does not conform to what they want to believe. I hardly think right-wingers are the only ones afflicted by that, though I would definitely agree they are more inclined to dig in their heels on the whole when faced with facts.
Marc
ahem,r€nato
It’s right there in the aricle:
Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.
Stevenovitch
That’s nice. Anybody think to give them misinformation that was in favor of a belief already supported by their ideology? You know, the same thing the Conservatives got?
The backlash bit is interesting, but I’m extremely doubtful that liberals don’t do it as well when it benefits their side of the argument.
UnkyT
Maybe more like a nice Staphylococcus infection. The more antibiotics you throw at it, the more immune to those antibiotics the infection becomes.
Conservatives just have a nasty case of falsylococcus and no amount of truth will cure it. Better to just let the subject die.
Stevenovitch
@Marc
His point (and mine) is that liberals are already ideologically inclined to agree with the refutation of Bush’s Stem cell policies, so the fact that they didn’t respond to it by redoubling their belief in something they already think is bullshit isn’t very surprising.
srv
SEC wants to ban short selling. Yikes.
Conservatively Liberal
I think there is a knee-jerk reaction from conservatives that happens whenever they perceive a ‘threat’ to their way of life or beliefs. Just the fact that they were being interviewed by people at a university would put them in a negative mindset from the start. This knee-jerk reaction allows the rats in the Republican party to exploit this reaction and explains why they really don’t care to tell the truth about something. They know that if they are caught in a lie or compromising position and are called out on it, their base will automatically back them up (see: Vitter, David).
If Elliot Spitzer had been a Republican, he would still be in office. Of that I have absolutely no doubt. If someone on the left fucks up, the left are fairly unmerciful about it. Not so with the right, they embrace their alternate reality because it is what they have based their lives on.
It is real to them, even if it is a lie. Because to believe reality then they have to agree with the other side. The hard core social conservatives will never do that.
Delia
Didn’t we used to call this “minimizing cognitive dissonance”?
handy
So this study proves that John was really a libtard all along. Or perhaps he’s a Manchurian candidate.
Damn, that guy is wily.
The Moar You Know
Bingo. I’ve got a wingnut relative who freaked the fuck out on me today when I showed her some of the footage that’s starting to come out from Texas WRT the damage inflicted by hurricane Ike. She literally doesn’t know what to make of it, because all those niggers in New Orleans died because they were too stupid to leave and it’s all their fault.
I’m sure by tomorrow she will have some utterly insane explanation for why more people died in Texas and why the government has botched the aid operation worse than they did with Katrina. I’ll bet it has something to do with Democrats, even. But it will be interesting as the right-wing noise machine has not yet spun up the excuse generator on this one, so I’m sure her explanation will go through several iterations before she gets the approved one from Savage/Weiner – her favorite spokesbeast for the Two Minutes Hate.
Just Some Fuckhead
It makes sense that I’m a liberal because I’m not afraid of anything. Except spiders. Spiders make me very conservative. I think I must have been a housefly in a previous life.
blogreeder
Tim, don’t hold back on your true feelings for conservatives.
Man, I always thought this site was run by socialist. Thanks for confirming it, Tim. Social Progress, another term for forced labor camps. Did you ever read the Road to serfdom?
Are you really sure about this? This site was non-stop Palin coverage just a short while ago. How long did you say a liberal deals with his shock and gets over it?
Tim F.
I’m not afraid to admit that I get completely conservative about centipedes. Spiders I can handle, but anything with more than eight legs (leaving aside mandibles and palps) brings on fight-or-flight time.
matt
No Mickey Kaus jokes yet?
Martin
Scientists by training don’t do this (implementations may vary). Much of it comes down to whether someone crafts their worldview based on measurable, repeatable facts or on beliefs. We have an entire nation that is steeped in the tradition of indoctrinating children to centering their world on belief rather than facts, and then in some cases teaching children that anyone brandishing facts is an ‘academic elitist’ and out to hoodwink you out of your belief that the world isn’t 6,000 years old.
This isn’t going to change until we decide as a society that the problems of the world will only be solved by a rational, measured responses and not by clapping harder and wishing the problems away. We need to decide whether the next generation will be better thinkers and eager to tackle the problems or better believers and eager to retreat to rituals and magical thinking.
Joshua Norton
Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best:
“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.”
KT
I think it’s a bit more subtle. I’ve never been a conservative so this could just be so much psychobabble, but It seems to me that conservatives use beliefs to define their identity while liberals seem to have a sense of identity that exists apart from their beliefs.
It’s much less threatening for a thought to be proven false than it is for a part of one’s identity to be proven false.
Along these lines, Sullivan had an interesting email on magical thinking from someone who grew up in a “deeply evangelical” home.
protected static
And it can also describe not letting shit leak into your drinking water. Your point? Oh, wait, that’s right… you don’t have one.
r€nato
sorry Marc, I’m not going to join the amen chorus on this one.
Take a group of liberals and present them with definitive proof that one of their dearest beliefs is flat-out wrong. Here’s one: find a group of left-wing “9/11 Truthers” and give them the facts about what happened on 9/11. They’ll be just as stubborn as the righties.
Anytime you challenge a belief that’s very important to someone’s world view – that there isn’t a God, that 9/11 was not an inside job, or that there really were no WMDs – they are going to resist. It’s human nature.
In my nearly 43 years’ experience on this plane of existence, it seems to me that people only change their most cherished views either through a very sudden and traumatic experience or through a slow, gradual process of internalizing and reconciling conflict between inner beliefs and outer reality.
Maybe you should ask John Cole about this. He might have a clue or two.
Bubblegum Tate
I take it, then, that you’ve never watched YouTubeage of giant centipedes, which are as big as your forearm and eat bats and mice. I will freely admit that those videos freaked me the fuck out.
PC
I wonder how this would work with /b/tards?
Joshua Norton
Apples and oranges. 10% of the wings on both sides are extreme to the point of being plain shithouse rat crazy. And I put the 9/11 “truthers” in this catagory. Tarring everyone here with that same brush is just plain stupid.
r€nato
a) I’m not tarring everyone here, Joshua.
b) I know people who are otherwise quite sane and rational but they believe 9/11 was an inside job.
c) if we’re going to exclude the extreme wings… what would you call folks who still approve of Bush and think those WMDs are hidden in Syria??? That’s not exactly mainstream thinking there.
TenguPhule
I’m all for workcamps for Republicans.
They owe us about $16 Trillion and its about time they payed it off.
jack fate
Welcome to American Fascism?
TenguPhule
It’s hard to blame them for that.
The other explanation requires grasping a level of Bush’s stupidity that few minds can handle without going insane.
r€nato
This is why China (and to some extent India) is going to eat our lunch over the next 50 years. While we are wasting time arguing over whether stem cell research kills little potential babies or whether God made the universe 6000 years ago over the course of six consecutive 24-hour periods or how much longer we should put off dealing with climate change and petroleum addiciton, the rest of the world is coming up with new advances in science, industry and engineering.
The American decline – if it’s not reversed, which means in large part keeping the goddamned Republicans and their Xian Taliban ‘Qaeda’ out of power for about 20 years or so – is going to be slow and gradual, but by mid-century our children’s children will look back and wonder what the hell was wrong with our generation. So much promise at the beginning of this century and already we’ve pissed so much away.
TenguPhule
Obviously, we’re all doomed.
sarsipius
Dang, all these posts and not a single reference to the Litany Against Fear? Thought there might be more Dune fans in here. First thing I thought when I saw “Fear is the mind-killer.”
r€nato
It’s like blaming the flies for the shit.
The Moar You Know
And South Korea. Britain. Japan. Canada. Norway. Been to Europe or Asia recently? It’s an eye-opener and not in a good way. You don’t see homeless everywhere. You see working infrastructure. You see advances in the human condition. You see functional societies.
Not here.
phobos
blogreeder:
Was it really non-stop? Honestly I hadn’t noticed.
Since Obama is moving ahead again in the polls, I can only conclude that there is a significant feature in the American psyche that eventually negates obvious cynicism.
One could only hope that the same sentiment would send little shitbags like you back to the ass-end of history.
The Moar You Know
It hasn’t held up well. And he should have stopped at the first one. He really should have stopped after “Children of Dune”. But no – he had to turn the whole thing into a textbook example of “running a franchise into the ground”.
And then his kid got into it after he died! Damn, talk about not knowing when to quit.
KG
It’s funny, I’ve always been fairly conservative/libertarian in my leanings (keep my taxes low, leave me alone), but I’ve always bought into FDR’s old line about there being nothing to fear but fear itself.
Probably why I can’t really be a republican anymore.
mannemalon
I see your point, but it seems you missed the crux of it.
It’s saying that MORE disbelieved it by a level of magnitude AFTER they were given a factual rebuttal to it.
That is different from what you’re saying. I’d love to see a mirror study for liberals, but it’s not simply about people believing in what they believe in. It’s taking an issue such as tax cuts’ impact on the economy, which I’m sure 99% of wingnuts know little about, giving them factual evidence to contradict it, and suddenly it doubles the number that believe the initial claim.
It’s pretty crazy. I’d love to see the same study with liberals and say Obama’s positions.
wasabi gasp
The numbers need fixin’ by November 4th, else the black man wins.
wasabi gasp
Yikes, my comment reads like I’m insinuating the SEC is racist. That wasn’t my point. I only meant they’re probably swinging for the geezer.
Jon H
“Dang, all these posts and not a single reference to the Litany Against Fear?”
The title is a single reference.
Any more is kinda redundant, no?
matt
I sort of agree with r€nato in the sense that I don’t think being “conservative” has much to do with anything. Although it gets complicated because one feature of (contemporary) conservative thinking is being wary of Smart People. So it’s a bit muddy. But as he points out, there’s no shortage of people of all different groups who believe weird shit, and aren’t going to be persuaded otherwise regardless of the evidence presented.
Richard Bottoms
Probably not intentional. :-)
matt
Ok, I posted before reading mannemalon’s comment, and yeah, that is pretty crazy.
Paul
I used to believe that wingnuts were intransigent and unable to assimilate ideas other than the pile of rocks in front of them. Now that I’ve read your notes about the research, I think they’re much cleverer than before . . . .
KG
So, I’m doing some reading up on economics. First, I’m surprised to see we haven’t had a deflationary period in this country since a brief spot in the 1950s. Second, I’m wondering if all this action by the government isn’t going to end up staving off deflation by creating a sick period of inflation. The more I read about economics, the more I realize you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So, everyone is fucked up by the credit crunch; try to fix the fuck up and end up fucking everyone up in a different way.
Like Jim Morrison said, “No one here gets out alive.”
Beej
My cousin, who is extremely intelligent, is nonetheless a born-again wingnut. She is impervious to reason. I have noted that any attempt to discuss the subtleties of an issue is immediately met by a blank wall of wingnut slogans and accusations of the left being everything from “misguided” to the anti-Christ.
I have come to the conclusion that her real issue is fear. She is afraid of anything that is not black and white, cut and dried. She craves CERTAINTY. I think ambiguity and complexity are the real enemies of wingnuts and conservatives. This is why they become even more entrenched when refutations are offered. The refutations raise even more questions about things they want to think of in terms of right or wrong, black or white. It’s sad, really.
wasabi gasp
Ignorance is Certitude’s fuck buddy.
Martin
Ok, this shit needs to end. From TPM:
So. Fucking. What?
If any one of the other 300-odd million people in this nation refused a subpoena, they’d be held in contempt and arrested. If he doesn’t believe it’s legitimate, show up with your attorney and file a motion. Todd isn’t a government official and he has no presumptive right to executive privilege. This is turning into Ruby Ridge levels of rejection of government authority. Arrest the fucker. This utter contempt for the process of law needs to end. I get called for jury duty every year (work for the state) and every year I cheerfully go and do what is asked of me. I never try to weasel out. Maybe I shouldn’t bother. Nobody from the Republican party seems to think that courts are valid, so why the fuck are the rest of us continuing to pretend that they are?
liberal
r€nato wrote,
India? No way. In the way of societal problems, we’ve got nothing compared to them. They’ve got big religious problems (Muslim vs Hindu), class problems (caste system), and an extremely high female illiteracy rate.
Martin
Oh, and I should add that any pretense of who is running the show is now gone:
Why is a presidential campaign speaking on this issue? Why are they obstructing the courts? Why do they have any involvement in an investigation that began before Palin even joined the campaign? Why isn’t Todd’s attorney making this statement? Seriously, hold the entire fucking campaign in contempt. We’re turning into goddamn Zimbabwe here.
liberal
blogreeder wrote,
LOL!
As opposed to the feudalist nirvana espoused by most so-called libertarians.
protected static
Well… India might by dint of sheer numbers alone – IIRC, their middle class alone is already larger than the entire population of the United States.
Martin
Well, both India and China are earning more engineering PhDs than the US is. Many of those degrees are being earned at US schools, but foreign PhD programs are growing and improving. In the US, we can’t buy PhD students for love or money. Hell, we’re struggling even to attract enough B.S. students. It’s a HUGE problem. Not all of the foreign students return home, but most of them do.
So not only do we have a dearth of talent coming through the pipeline in the US, we make fucking stupid investments with the money we have. The billions we are pumping into road projects with no provisional planning for rail is asinine. For all this effort creating electric vehicles, we’ve ignored practical deployment of mature electric rail in urban areas which costs no more per mile to build than road, scales extremely well, is safer, and is far, far cheaper per capita to operate.
Calouste
Still, Indian middle class doesn’t make that much. The GDP/capita in India is about $1000/year (compared to $45,000/year for the US).
If you’re looking for a group in India larger than the entire population of the United States, it’s probably the ones getting by on less than one dollar per day.
Shaggy
Tooooo many pupppppies….
With guns in their hands…
Tooo many puuuppies…
Chuck Butcher
KT:
So it’s OK that I’m a lefty who does hot rods and shooting and is a NE OR nail banger?
protected static
Calouste: Current estimates put India’s middle class at 300 million, give or take a few hundred thousand. Some have projected that this number will be almost 600 million by 2025 – that’s a tremendous amount of consumption, regardless of the difference in per-capita income.
Martin
Depends. Do those things define who you are to a degree that if you could no longer do them that you would have no identity? Alternatively, are those interests given to you as part of some broader cosmic tapestry that you personally do not feel empowered to alter?
Xenos
Interestingly, according to the older versions of the myth, one of Hydra’s heads was immortal. Hercules cut it off, cauterized the neck, and then had to bury the still smoking and poisonous-blood dripping head under a giant rock or mountain. That mountain, somewhere in Argolis, still smokes from volcanic activity, and emits chemicals that poison the waters in that part of the country.
The myth is an interesting depiction of how even the divine uberman can not fully conquer madness and chthonic evil (chthonic = subconscious, I think), and that the poison festers and suppurates in the human soul and the body politic. Hercules was eventually killed by being exposed to the poison of the Hydra, which caused him to lose his mind and throw himself on a funeral pyre.
Which is roughly equivalent to the madness of racism, the vestigial poison of slavery, driving this country to put a generation of complete crooks and incompetents in charge of its affairs.
MFB
Mmmmmph. I remain unconvinced that there is a gigantic brain-wired difference between liberals and conservatives. They often tend to vote the same in Congress, you might note.
One thought, however. Conservatives are natural prey for the paranoia promoted by the US government since 9/11. If you are scared all the time, of irrational things, you are more vulnerable to panic. And you are likely to be more committed to your fears and your irrational beliefs. This might make a difference, which is comprehensible.
But it would have been nice to see a genuine test done on liberals. What was done does throw some discredit on the whole research effort.
Stoic
We shouldn’t call them fearful. We should use the more appropriate word – cowards.
shpx.ohfu
Everyone must have the Emergency Zombie Defense Station.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Could he be the one?
Tax Analyst
Yeah, color me unsurprised, Tim…
I’m not happy to say this, but from observing the polls for this election I’d have to make “Ritual & Magical Thinking” at least a 9/5 favorite over “Rational & Measured Responses, Not to include Hand Clapping/Wishing”. I don’t really think the majority of Americans are totally locked into teh Worship of Stupid, but it’s close enough to half that when you throw in the people who have a vested interest in promoting and nurturing the brain-resistant dogma they can pretty much stop anything that resembles clear, rational thinking that enters into the political arena. It’s somewhat hard to get too optimistic about our nation’s future when you see that “Logic” has pretty much become just so much Roadkill on our Informational Super-Highway.
For the record, I still think Obama will win the Presidency in November, but it will be a much closer election than it ought to be. In a rational society the McCain/Palin candidacy would not come within 40 points of Obama/Biden.
Shygetz
No, no, no, you misunderstand. Liberals were given misinformation that was critical of Bush’s stem cell policy–misinformation that liberals are presumably sympathetic towards. The misinformation was then refuted. The “backfire effect” was not seen. They found the same effect in misinformation ads attacking John Roberts; the refutations partially alleviated the effect of the misinformation among liberals, and no “backfire effect” was noted. In contrast, refutation of the misinformation among conservatives actually increased the number of conservatives that believed the misinformation (almost doubled it in one case).
Notorious P.A.T.
Study: Whiny, Insecure Kids Grow Up Conservative
Notorious P.A.T.
Have you had your head buried in the sand for the last dozen or so years?
r€nato
RULE OF LAW! RULE OF LAW!*
*this offer does not apply to Republicans.
r€nato
I loved the first Dune. Read it at least three or four times, and it’s a THICK book.
Somehow managed to slog through the 2nd book but it was painful and I wouldn’t do it again.
Couldn’t get 50 pages into the third one.
Why is there still a market for the sequels??? I can’t imagine they’ve gotten any better.
Notorious P.A.T.
Or to put it another way: liberals create their beliefs from experience, while conservatives create their experience from their beliefs.
libarbarian
Dude,
You have way to much faith in 300 million of your fellows. Way too much.
r€nato
Well, that was my point. They did not do similar research on liberals, and what they did do was NOT equal to what they did with conservatives. What they did was present them with commonly-held information about the Bush administration’s position on stem-cell research and then a refutation of that information. I’m saying that that was probably not a belief as dear to liberals as, say, what we generally believe about abortion or taxes or defense policy.
I would imagine that the ‘false’ position is that Bush has banned all stem-cell research, and the ‘true’ position is that the Bush administration has prohibited federal funding for stem-cell research in all but a handful of stem-cell lines. That’s not a ban on research, just on federal funding for it.
Now, that is not as difficult an issue upon which to adjust one’s thinking as it is when you ask a Bush-loving conservative to admit that there were no WMDs.
I will agree that generally speaking, liberals are more likely to change their minds when presented with factual evidence. After all, we are the ones who tend to think with our heads rather than our guts. Liberals tend to be better-educated, more widely read, and so on. I know that sounds elitist but it is a fact that there is a strong correlation between the amount of education one has and one’s political identification.
Still, I have known at least a few liberals who can be as stubborn in their beliefs as any conservative.
Notorious P.A.T.
Bernie Sanders votes the same as Orrin Hatch?
libarbarian
Um, Guys,
Lets not all start sucking each others dicks just yet. Science reporting is usually quite lame and some experiments have bad methodology. There is something lame about jumping on every experiment that can be interpreted as complimentary to oneself and uncomplimentary to ones enemies. Doesn’t necessarily make it true or good science.
Still, I think Prof. Cole’s got the explanation that most correlates with my own past experience. I liked to “debunk liberal bullshit” which had the effect of further buttressing my own opinions. I see that a lot still. I wouldn’t be surprised if that did go on a lot.
r€nato
I’ll have you know that I refused to take anyone’s cock in my mouth :-)
tBone
As long as you still believe in forced abortions, mandatory gay marriage, the outlawing of Christianity and the surrender of our national sovereignty to the global caliphate, we’re cool.
I thought the first two novels were fantastic, and the third book was pretty damn good too, provided you had the patience for it. The less said about the remainder of the original series, the better.
As for the sequels/prequels written by Herbert’s son and some other hack – I got through one, and let me just say that reading it after someone had used it to wipe their ass would have been an improvement.
Chuck Butcher
Let me see if I can put this in perspective, I shoot – a lot. I own a lot of firearms of various purposes. Even with all the sporting influences on my “armory” it is still essentially my response to the existance of government, any government. It means a capability to do a bit more absolute pushback than my freedom of press and electoral activities. So partially this is about skill in use, choice, and build and also about fundamental philosophy.
Hot rods, these specialized vehicles aren’t transportation, they’re for fun. I’ve built a ’62 Chevy II Nova into a road car capable of high 12sec 1/4 miles, it isn’t quite a sports car, but very close and yet goes the first 60 feet in 1.73 sec, 0-43 mph in 60 feet. That is exciting and it has an element of danger. A lot of research, and hard work to get to the desired capabilities. If you trusted the aerodynamics of that body, it would take you to 150 mph. I don’t. The thing carves corners and is a rocket and gee, it stops as well. But gentle throttle will get you 15mpg Premium.
I’m not fearless, but I have a very, very high tolerance. Maybe that is one of the reasons I can be quite hetero and still have a lot of gay friends and in fact be a regional spokesperson for BRO (Basic Rights Oregon) in a very red part of the state. In today’s political climate I’m pretty far left, which I find odd since I knew real leftist of old. I had the nerve to run for OR US HD 02 in the Dem Primary on a left wing, BOR & 2nd Amendment platform. (OR 02) is larger than any state east of the Mississippi R.