We are noticing all of the same things, and I think teh answer lies in understanding the r/K material here:
http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/?page_id=59
I did a post on examinations of people’s brains as they did things, and it showed high-dopamine function individuals were showing activity in areas associated with the task at hand. They were competitive, and were focusing on the task, to achieve victory. These are conseratives.
Low-dopamine function individuals showed activity in different areas, associated with social maneuvering. Note, having a defective dopamine receptor gene would reduce dopamine function, and is known to predispose one to ideological Liberalism.
As I see it, if you are Conservative, you want to perform your activity right. You need to, in order to succeed in competition with others, for limited resources. If you set a task and fail, you are out-competed practically, and don’t get resources.
If resources were everywhere, and you pursue that strategy, then you have wasted your time, because task success is not useful. The loser will just go somewhere else, and get their food there, and you have wasted a lot of effort winning a fight which gave you no real advantage. You end up right, but the r-selected psycholgy ends up with the offspring, which is where the real battle was all the time. This could be likeend to the sexy sons hypothesis, which only holds so long as the less sexy individuals don’t start killing off the metrosexuals, and denying them resources competitively.
In this r-selective environment, the only way to “win” is to achieve social dominance to facilitate increased mating activity, and this is what Liberals are programmed to do. So while you argue facts, logic, reason, and try to be technically correct, the Liberal’d brain focuses on getting the crowd to support them and ally with them, and doesn’t focus on the mechanics of the task at hand, namely finding truth.
The techniques they use to do this are many, as you noted. Attack your morals, attack your intelligence, lie, cheat, present false assumptions, ridicule, and get angry over anything which makes them look like a tool, to show socially that it is not only wrong, it offends them, and should offend the crowd. I call this all out-grouping. They want to out-group you, to turn the crowd on you. It is their only focus.
As they do this, their brain will show the activity in social maneuvering on a brain scan, and actually look different from ours, as we try to be technically correct.
That is why I make the case I do, to meet the Liberal on this battlefield, and out-group them preemptively, rather than focusing on logic and reason. What point is being right, if Liberals aren’t made to be ashamed of their Liberalism?
It is also why I think an evolutionary understanding of the purposes which ideologies serve in nature is so vital to moving forward. Without it, we are just flying blind, fighting something about which we understand nothing - not even its purpose.
The techniques they use to do this are many, as you noted. Attack your morals, attack your intelligence, lie, cheat, present false assumptions, ridicule, and get angry over anything which makes them look like a tool, to show socially that it is not only wrong, it offends them, and should offend the crowd. I call this all out-grouping. They want to out-group you, to turn the crowd on you. It is their only focus."
This is so good it should be framed.
One of my favorite tactics is to find a point where I know a progressive is being intellectually dishonest, and talk them down to where they agree both the left and right have a point, both are moral, and the difference is largely subjective. No matter how angry or reasoned they thought they were when they started, just the very act of getting to agree both sides have a point collapses their argument.
I always found this curious, because I knew both sides had a morally arguable point going in. I was never able to understand why the simple act of getting them to admit this point would actually win the argument for me, even if they never even changed their minds on the subject in question.
It's like they shut themselves down to the idea that any opposing view could have subjective or objective merit, while simultaneously accusing that from others and congratulating themselves on being paragons of reason and science.
I suppose that's really what I was driving at, though. How are progressives so comfortable with being intellectually and emotionally dishonest? How are they able to hate intolerance by use of the emotion of hate and intolerant attitudes?
At any rate, I'll be adding your blog to my newsfeed. Great stuff.
On a macro scale, this is what they try to do to Fox News, the NRA, or name-your-villain of the week. As Saul Alinksy would say, “Pcik your target, freeze it, personalize it, then polarize it.”
Out-grouping.
I must mediate upon this.