Conservatives Dissected and Explained

It took the government of the United States to do it but there’s finally an explanation of just what makes Conservatives tick. From The Guardian:

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity”.

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report’s four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them “preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality”.

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

“This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes,” the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

And you thought conservatism wasn’t a disease. It’s not that they’re bad, they just malfunction.

 

Global Warming Tourism

This little fellow is the Asian Tiger mosquito. With much of the world getting warmer, he’s been arriving at all sorts of new places.

The Asian Tiger is being blamed for spreading chikungunya fever to Italy. The Italians have been dealing with an outbreak of 300-cases of the fever. Before this outbreak there had only been one case of the fever recorded in that country.

The spread of this mosquito is of particular concern because of two other gifts it often carries – dengue fever and yellow fever. Dengue fever has a 7% fatality rate.

The spread of the Asian Tiger has been remarkable. It is now firmly established in much of Latin America, in a minimum of 26 states of the US, in parts of Africa and much of southern and parts of central Europe. In North America it’s credited with spreading West Nile, eastern equine encephalomyelitis and Cache Valley virus.