Daily Archives: May 9, 2017

In March, students at Middlebury College disrupted a lecture by the conservative political scientist Charles Murray because they disagreed with some of his writings. Last month, the University of California, Berkeley, canceled a lecture by the conservative commentator Ann Coulter due to concerns for her safetyjust two months after uninviting the conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos due to violent protests. Media outlets on the right have played up the incidents as evidence of rising close-mindedness on the left.

For years, its conservatives who have been branded as intolerant, often for good reason. But conservatives will tell you that liberals demonstrate their own intolerance, using the strictures of political correctness as a weapon of oppression. That became a familiar theme during the 2016 campaign. After the election, Sean McElwee, a policy analyst at the progressive group Demos Action, reported that Donald Trump had received his strongest support among Americans who felt that whites and Christians faced a great deal of discrimination. Spencer Greenberg, a mathematician who runs a website for improving decision-making, found that the biggest predictor of voting for Trump after party affiliation was the rejection of political correctnessTrumps voters felt silenced.

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So whos right? Are conservatives more prejudiced than liberals, or vice versa? Research over the years has shown that in industrialized nations, social conservatives and religious fundamentalists possess psychological traits, such as the valuing of conformity and the desire for certainty, that tend to predispose people toward prejudice. Meanwhile, liberals and the nonreligious tend to be more open to new experiences, a trait associated with lower prejudice. So one might expect that, whatever each groups own ideology, conservatives and Christians should be inherently more discriminatory on the whole.

But more recent psychological research, some of it presented in January at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), shows that its not so simple. These findings confirm that conservatives, liberals, the religious and the nonreligious are each prejudiced against those with opposing views. But surprisingly, each group is about equally prejudiced. While liberals might like to think of themselves as more open-minded, they are no more tolerant of people unlike them than their conservative counterparts are.

Political understanding might finally stand a chance if we could first put aside the argument over who has that bigger problem. The truth is that we all do.

***

When Mark Brandt, an American-trained psychologist now at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, first entered graduate school, he wondered why members of groups that espouse tolerance are so often intolerant. I realized that there was a potential contradiction in the literature, he told me. On the one hand, liberals have a variety of personality traits and moral values that should protect them from expressing prejudice. On the other hand, people tend to express prejudice against people who do not share their values. So, if you value open-mindedness, as liberals claim to do, and you see another group as prejudiced, might their perceived prejudice actually increase your prejudice against them?

Brandt approached this question with Geoffrey Wetherell and Christine Reyna in a 2013 paper published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. They asked a variety of Americans about their political ideologies; how much they valued traditionalism, egalitarianism and self-reliance; and their feelings toward eight groups of people, four of them liberal (feminists, atheists, leftist protesters and pro-choice people) and four of them conservative (supporters of the traditional family, religious fundamentalists, Tea Party protesters and pro-life people). Participants reported how much each group violated their core values and beliefs, and they assessed how much they supported discrimination toward that group, by rating their agreement with statements such as Feminists should not be allowed to make a speech in this city and Prolife people deserve any harassment they receive.

As predicted, conservatives were more discriminatory than liberals toward liberal groups, and liberals were more discriminatory than conservatives toward conservative groups. Conservatives discrimination was driven by their higher traditionalism and by liberal groups apparent violation of their values. Liberals discrimination was driven by their lower traditionalism and by conservative groups apparent violation of their values. Complicating matters, conservatives highly valued self-reliance, which weakened their discrimination toward liberal groups, perhaps because self-reliance is associated with the freedom to believe or do what one wants. And liberals highly valued universalism, which weakened their discrimination toward conservative groups, likely because universalism espouses acceptance of all.

But these differences didnt affect the larger picture: Liberals were as discriminatory toward conservative groups as conservatives were toward liberal groups. And Brandts findings have been echoed elsewhere: Independently and concurrently, the labs of John Chambers at St. Louis University and Jarret Crawford at The College of New Jersey have also found approximately equal prejudice among conservatives and liberals.

Newer research has rounded out the picture of two warring tribes with little tolerance toward one another. Not only are conservatives unfairly maligned as more prejudiced than liberals, but religious fundamentalists are to some degree unfairly maligned as more prejudiced than atheists, according to a paper Brandt and Daryl Van Tongeren published in January in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. To be sure, they found that people high in religious fundamentalism were more cold and dehumanizing toward people low in perceived fundamentalism (atheists, gay men and lesbians, liberals and feminists) than people low in fundamentalism were toward those high in perceived fundamentalism (Catholics, the Tea Party, conservatives and Christians). But this prejudice gap existed only if the strength of the perceivers religious belief was also very high. Otherwise, each end of the fundamentalist spectrum looked equally askance at each other. And while liberals and the nonreligious sometimes defend themselves as being intolerant of intolerance, they cant claim this line as their own. In the study, bias on both ends was largely driven by seeing the opposing groups as limiting ones personal freedom.

Other researchers have come forward with similar findings. Filip Uzarevic, from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Beligium, has reported preliminary data showing that Christians were more biased against Chinese, Muslims and Buddhists than were atheists and agnostics, but they were less biased than atheists and agnostics against Catholics, anti-gay activists and religious fundamentalists (with atheists expressing colder feelings than agnostics). So, again, the religious and nonreligious have their own particular targets of prejudice. Perhaps more surprising, atheists and agnostics were less open to alternative opinions than Christians, and they reported more existential certainty. Uzarevic suggested to me after the SPSP conference that these results might be specific to the studys location, Western Europe, which is highly secularized and where the nonreligious, unlike Christians, do not have so many opportunities and motivations to integrate ideas challenging their own.

If liberalism and secularism dont mute prejudice, you can guess what Brandt found about intelligence. In a study published last year in Social Psychological and Personality Science, he confirmed earlier findings linking low intelligence to prejudice, but showed it was only against particular groups. Low cognitive ability (as measured by a vocabulary test) correlated with bias against Hispanics, Asian Americans, atheists, gay men and lesbians, blacks, Muslims, illegal immigrants, liberals, whites, people on welfare and feminists. High cognitive ability correlated with bias against Christian fundamentalists, big business, Christians (in general), the Tea Party, the military, conservatives, Catholics, working-class people, rich people and middle-class people. But raw brainpower itself doesnt seem to be the deciding factor in who we hate: When Brandt controlled for participants demographics and traditionalism (smart people were more supportive of newer lifestyles and less supportive of traditional family ties), intelligence didnt correlate with overall levels of prejudice.

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So whats at the root of our equal-opportunity prejudice? Conservatives are prejudiced against feminists and other left-aligned groups and liberals are prejudiced against fundamentalists and other right-aligned groups, but is it really for political reasons? Or is there something about specific social groups beyond their assumed political ideologies that leads liberals and conservatives to dislike them? Feminists and fundamentalists differ on many dimensions beyond pure politics: geography, demographics, social status, taste in music.

In a paper forthcoming in Psychological Science, Brandt sought to answer those questions by building prediction models to estimate not only whether someones political views would increase positive or negative feelings about a target group, but also precisely how much, and which aspects of the group affected those feelings the most.

First, Brandt used surveys of Americans to assess the perceived traits of 42 social groups, including Democrats, Catholics, gays and lesbians and hipsters. How conservative, conventional and high-status were typical members of these groups? And how much choice did they have over their group membership? (Some things are seen as more genetic than othersLady Gagas anthem Born This Way was adopted by homosexuals, not hipsters.) Then he looked at data from a national election survey that asked people their political orientation and how warm or cold their feelings were toward those 42 groups.

Conservative political views were correlated with coldness toward liberals, gays and lesbians, transgender people, feminists, atheists, people on welfare, illegal immigrants, blacks, scientists, Hispanics, labor unions, Buddhists, Muslims, hippies, hipsters, Democrats, goths, immigrants, lower-class people and nerds. Liberal political views, on the other hand, were correlated with coldness toward conservatives, Christian fundamentalists, rich people, the Tea Party, big business, Christians, Mormons, the military, Catholics, the police, men, whites, Republicans, religious people, Christians and upper-class people.

Brandt found that knowing only a target groups perceived political orientation (are goths seen as liberal or conservative?), you can predict fairly accurately whether liberals or conservatives will express more prejudice toward them, and how much. Social status (is the group respected by society?) and choice of group membership (were they born that way?) mattered little. It appears that conflicting political values really are what drive liberal and conservative prejudice toward these groups. Feminists and fundamentalists differ in many ways, but, as far as political prejudice is concerned, only one way really matters.

In another recent paper, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Crawford, Brandt and colleagues also found that people were especially biased against those who held opposing social, versus economic, political ideologiesperhaps because cultural issues seem more visceral than those that involve spreadsheets.

None of this, of course, explains why liberals open-mindedness doesnt better protect them against prejudice. One theory is that the effects of liberals unique traits and worldviews on prejudice are swamped by a simple fact of humanity: We like people similar to us. Theres a long line of research showing that we prefer members of our own group, even if the group is defined merely by randomly assigned shirt color, as one 2011 study found. Social identity is strongstronger than any inclination to seek or suppress novelty. As Brandt told me, The openness-related traits of liberals are not some sort of prejudice antidote.

Brandt further speculates that ones tendency to be open- or closed-minded affects ones treatment of various groups mostly by acting as a group definition in itselfare you an Open or a Closed? Supporting this idea, he and collaborators reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2015 that, although openness to new experiences correlated with lower prejudice against a wide collection of 16 social groups, it actually increased prejudice against the most closed-minded groups in the bunch. Open-minded people felt colder than closed-minded people toward conventional groups such as evangelical Christians, Republicans and supporters of the traditional family. And, unsurprisingly, closed-minded people were more biased than open-minded people against unconventional groups such as atheists, Democrats, poor people, and gays and lesbians. Research consistently shows that liberals are more open than conservatives, but in many cases what matters is: Open to what?

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Knowing all this, can we change tolerance levels? You might think that the mind-expanding enterprise of education would reduce prejudice. But according to another presentation at the SPSP meeting, it does not. It does, however, teach people to cover it up. Maxine Najle, a researcher at the University of Kentucky, asked people if they would consider voting for a presidential candidate who was atheist, black, Catholic, gay, Muslim or a woman. When asked directly, participants with an education beyond high school reported a greater willingness to vote for these groups than did less-educated participants. But when asked in a more indirect way, with more anonymity, the two groups showed equal prejudice. So higher education seems to instill an understanding of the appropriate levels of intolerance to express, Najle told me, not necessarily higher tolerance.

Educations suppression of expressed prejudice suggests a culture of political correctness in which people dont feel comfortable sharing their true feelings for fear of reprisaljust the kind of intolerance conservatives complain about. And yet, as a society, weve agreed that certain kinds of speech, such as threats and hate speech, are to be scorned. Theres an argument to be made that conservative intolerance does more harm than liberal intolerance, as it targets more vulnerable people. Consider the earlier list of groups maligned by liberals and conservatives. Rich people, Christians, men, whites and the police would generally seem to have more power today than immigrants, gays, blacks, poor people and goths. According to Brandt, Weve understandably received a variety of pushback when we suggest that prejudice towards Christians and conservatives is prejudice. To many its just standing up to bullies.

Conservatives, however, dont view it that way. Nowadays, as the right sees it, the left has won the culture war and controls the media, the universities, Hollywood and the education of everyones children, says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University who studies politics and morality. Many of them think that they are the victims, they are fighting back against powerful and oppressive forces, and their animosities are related to that worldview.

Robbie Sutton, a psychologist at the University of Kent in England, presented preliminary findings at SPSP that touch on the issue of which intolerance is more justifiable. He found that people who endorsed denialist conspiracy theories about climate change (e.g., Climate change is a myth promoted by the government as an excuse to raise taxes and curb peoples freedom) were more likely than those who endorsed warmist conspiracy theories (e.g., Politicians and industry lobbyists are pressuring scientists to downplay the dangers of climate change) to want to censor, surveil and punish climate scientists, whereas warmists were more likely than denialists to want to punish and surveil climate change skeptics. But are these sentiments equally harmful? Many people would say thats a subjective question, but its hard to ignore the evidence, for instance, that Exxon has hidden its knowledge of climate change for years, and the fact that that the current Republican administration has placed new restrictions on Environmental Protection Agency scientists. Who is more vulnerable, and backed by scientific evidence: Exxon or environmental researchers?

Regardless of who has the more toxic intolerance, the fact remains that people have trouble getting along. What to do? One of the most consistent ways to increase tolerance is contact with the other side and sharing the experience of working toward a goal, Brandt says. He suggests starting with the person next door. Everyone benefits from safe neighborhoods, a stimulating cultural environment and reliable snow removal, he says. If liberal and conservative neighbors can find ways to work together on the local level to improve their neighborhoods and communities, it might help to increase tolerance in other domains. (If you can find a neighbor of the opposite party, that is.)

Progressives might see the conservatives trailing history as being on its wrong side, but conservatives might feel the same way about the progressives way ahead of the train. Getting everyone onboard simultaneously could well be impossible, but if we share a common vision, even partially, maybe we can at least stay on the tracks.

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Why Liberals Aren't as Tolerant as They Think - POLITICO Magazine

What's drawn less attention is how Trump's presidency has convinced liberals that every bad thing whispered about any Republican is, by default, true. Consider that in the last week alone, liberal outrage has been sparked on (at least) four occasions by alleged incidents that simply aren't accurate.

Didn't matter! By then, the idea of Republicans cracking beers while voting to take away health care from millions of people was already surging across the Internet. (Look at how many retweets Jaffe's original tweet received versus how many the second tweet got.)

Immediately following the passage of the AHCA last Thursday, a talking point emerged: If this bill became a law, being raped or sexually assaulted would qualify as pre-existing conditions and, therefore, would make it much harder for the victim to get health insurance.

"The notion that AHCA classifies rape or sexual assault as a preexisting condition, or that survivors would be denied coverage, is false...this claim relies on so many factors including unknown decisions by a handful of states and insurance companies that this talking point becomes almost meaningless."

The Federal Communications Commission announced that it was investigating complaints following late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert's controversial comments about President Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In each of these four instances -- and all of these have been in the last week! -- liberals, fueled by Twitter outrage, jumped to conclusions that portrayed Trump and other Republicans in the poorest possible light. And, on each occasion, the fuller story either totally or mostly rebutted the version of the story the left had seized on.

Trump's presidency presents Democrats with lots and lots of legitimate issues on which to push back -- from the travel ban to the ongoing questions about Trump officials' ties to Russia to the president's refusal to release his tax returns.

By embracing every single tweet or whisper as yet another piece of full-proof evidence of just how terrible Republicans are, Democrats run the risk of appearing like the boy who cried wolf to the public -- and in the process taking some steam out of the very legitimate questions they are asking about the Trump administration.

Read more from the original source:

Donald Trump is turning liberals into conspiracy theorists - CNN

Close allies of former President Barack Obama quietly launched a new technology startup on Monday to further their ambitions of helping liberal candidates win political races across the country after waves of losses during the Obama years.

The latest move is called Higher Ground Labs and is being launched by a handful of Obama acolytes including the ex-presidents 2012 online organizing director Betsy Hoover and Organizing for Action Executive Director Jon Carson, as well as former executives from Tumblr and Google.

Higher Ground hopes to double down on Democratic reliance on technology to organize activists and track voting trends, by focusing on lower-profile races, from governors to town mayors. The group reportedly already has taken in $1 million in new donations.

OBAMA, DEMOCRATIC 'SUPER GROUP' UNITE TO END GERRYMANDERING, WIN STATE RACES, RECLAIM MAJORITIES

Higher Ground is seeking tech entrepreneurs on its website, Are you building a new tool or product to meet a challenge confronting progressive campaigns? Apply for our accelerator program!

Max Wood, developer of Deck Apps, is one such entrepreneur.According to his website, Deck is a predictive modeling tool used by progressive campaigns and causes to better understand how many votes it will take to win an election and where those votes are most likely to come from. Wood said Higher Ground is helping him change the way we organize so we can find new ways of winning, claiming theres a real risk we could end up losing the thread on this movement.

Theyve got their work cut out for them. Since 2009, Democrats have lost control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, along with 900 state legislative seats. The GOP now holds 32 state houses and 33 governorships more than 60 percent of state-level political power.

"As a lifelong campaigner, it is clear that we could be scaling faster and innovating in smarter ways, said Hoover, a Higher Ground Labs co-founder. As Democrats, our organizing needs to evolve.

THE EXES: OBAMA AVOIDS HITTING TRUMP, HILLARY SKEWERS THE MEDIA

Higher Ground Labs is yet another component in an emerging strategy by ex-President Obama to continue his advocacy, with funding from wealthy scions of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.When laying out his vision for his post-presidential activism, Obama said last October that he wanted to create a platform where young activists can get trained and learn from each other.He also gave an overview last week for his presidential center in Chicago, which he envisions in part as a campus for training future political leaders.

Much of the reported work so far has involved raising large sums of money with long-time Obama bundlers like Marty Nesbitt, founder of Chicago-based Parking Spot who is now raising millions of dollars of donations for the new Obama presidential library in Chicago.

A leftist online publication called Jacobin Mag reported the following reply when it pressed the Barack Obama Foundation for answers on whether the president is getting paid by corporate America to ease off progressive policies:TheObama Foundation will focus on developing the next generation of citizens and what it means to be a good citizen in the 21st century. More than a library, or a museum, the Obama Presidential Center will be a place that brings people together and inspires individuals and communities to take on big challenges.

Meanwhile, Obamas nonprofit community organizing project, Organizing for Action, is bringing in thousands of new people who have never been engaged before, connecting them to a nationwide grassroots network, providing them with cost-free training, and empowering them to apply those skills to make change in their communities," according to OFA communications director Jesse Lehrich.

Originally posted here:

Obama operatives unveil latest plan to boost liberal candidates - Fox News

Just a few decades ago, people believed, as is the scientific consensus, that among humans there are only two genders: male and female.

In 2017, however, progressives argue there are dozens of human genders, including being gender-less or even gender-fluid, meaning a persons gender changes periodically based on how hefeels. They argue that gender isnt tied to scientific study and research but instead to how someone identifies.

But a recent scientific study conducted by the Weizmann Institute of Science is tearing holes into the progressive narrative that sex and gender arent tied to science.

The study found that there are more than 6,500 unique genes in the human genome that express different traits depending on a persons gender, either male or female, which explains the huge biological differences between men and women.

That means more than 21 percent of the entire human genome, which is composed of about 30,000 genes, code for gender-specific traits.

Weizmann Institute of Science researchers recently uncovered thousands of human genes that are expressed copied out to make proteins differently in the two sexes, according to Weizmann.

Two scientists from the institutes Molecular Genetics Department professor Shmuel Pietrokovski and Dr. Moran Gershoni looked closely at around 20,000 protein-coding genes, sorting them by sex and searching for differences in expression in each tissue. They eventually identified around 6,500 genes with activity that was biased toward one sex or the other in at least one tissue, the institute reported.

For example, they found genes that were highly expressed in the skin of men relative to that in womens skin, and they realized that these were related to the growth of body hair. Gene expression for muscle building was higher in men; that for fat storage was higher in women, the reportexplained.

The researchers also discovered that harmful sex-specific genes, such as those that make a person infertile, are less likely to be weeded out of the gene pool especially in men.

The more a gene was specific to one sex, the less selection we saw on the gene. And one more difference: This selection was even weaker with men, Gershoni said.

More from the Weizmann:

Aside from the sexual organs, the researchers discovered quite a few sex-linked genes in the mammary glands not so surprising, except that about half of these genes were expressed in men. Because men have fully fitted but basically nonfunctional mammary equipment, the scientists made an educated guess that some of these genes might suppress lactation.

Less obvious locations included genes that were found to be expressed only in the left ventricle of the heart in women. One of these genes, which is also related to calcium uptake, showed very high expression levels in younger women that sharply decreased with age; the scientists think that they are active in women up to menopause, protecting their hearts, but leading to heart disease and osteoporosis in later years when the gene expression is shut down.

Yet another gene that was mainly expressed in women was active in the brain, and though its exact function is unknown, the scientists think it may protect the neurons from Parkinsons a disease that has a higher prevalence and earlier onset in men. The researchers also identified gene expression in the liver in women that regulates drug metabolism, providing molecular evidence for the known difference in drug processing between women and men.

In the end, Pietrokovski said his research proves the genetic differences between men and women and why evolution between men and women should be seen as co-evolution.

Paradoxically, sex-linked genes are those in which harmful mutations are more likely to be passed down, including those that impair fertility. From this vantage point, men and women undergo different selection pressures and, at least to some extent, human evolution should be viewed as co-evolution, Pietrokovski said.

However, the study did not conclude that there are more than two human genders.

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New scientific report challenges the liberal progressive transgender ... - TheBlaze.com

New York Times

Keith Olbermann Was Once Cable News's Liberal Standard-Bearer ... New York Times Since November, viewers have flocked to liberal commentators on cable news while Olbermann, who pioneered the field, rails against Trump from a GQ ... and more »

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Keith Olbermann Was Once Cable News's Liberal Standard-Bearer ... - New York Times

A super PAC aligned with the House Republican leadership and Speaker Paul RyanPaul RyanDem vows to storm Ryans district to protest health bill Crowd chants 'shame' as Ryan enters Harlem charter school GOP rep: ObamaCare repeal isnt something to celebrate MORE (R-Wis.) released a new adTuesdayattacking Democrat Jon Ossoff for raising most of his campaign cash from out-of-state donors in the runoff to fill an open U.S. House seat in Georgia.

The Congressional Leadership Funds (CLF) first ad in the runoff period ahead of OssoffsJune 20 race against Republican Karen Handel casts the Democrat as an ally of San Francisco liberals such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

The CLF ad features an array of young liberals thanking Georgians for supporting Ossoff.

We already have Nancy Pelosi as our congresswoman, now youre going to give us Jon Ossoff as our congressman, says a man with pigtail braids.

Were proud that California is the leading funder of the Jon Ossoff campaign, says another. Were really excited that Jon Ossoff likes paying higher taxes.

They go on to accuse Ossoff and Pelosi of seeking to weaken the military and failing to take ISIS seriously.

"ISIS?" says a woman wearing a floppy hat and a "Cut the military now!" button. "They're overrated."

San Francisco loves them some Jon Ossoff, a man in the ad concludes.

Federal Election Commission reports show that about 95 percent of Ossoffs campaign contributions have come from outside of Georgia.

The race to replace Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price in Georgias sixth district has attracted national attention. Money is pouring in from outside groups on both sides in a race that is viewed as an early referendum on President Trump.

Republicans look to beat back the challenge from Ossoff in a traditionally red district, where the outcome will be seen as a bellwether for the 2018 midterm battle over control of the House.

Those factors have contributed to making it one of the most expensive House races in history.

The CLF alone spent more than $3 million against Ossoff before the special election in mid-April, and will invest another $3.5 million during the run-off period.

More:

GOP group casts Ossoff as West Coast liberal in new ad - The Hill