AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

You are talking to someone with 2 adopted children, and we love them as our own. They are now responsible adults by the way.

We're not talking about you; we're talking about those women who are raped, or are otherwise not capable of taking care of a baby. How many more babies are you willing to adopt? 1,000? Quit being an ass; it's about the conservatives who really don't care for babies born in this country, but want to enforce legally for women not to have a choice to whether they should or can have a baby. You want to force them to have the birth, but ignore them after they are born. There are 133 million children without parents. There aren't enough okies in this world to adopt even a small percentage of orphaned children.

From sos-usa.org.

So your answer is to have them killed? Quit being a jerk, ci. You know better.

I cannot make people care for their offspring, but I think the offspring deserve at least a chance, rather than being murdered because they are an inconvenience. Pleas place the lame where it belongs. Conservatives are not responsible for the calloused views and irresponsiblities of liberals.

That's up to the woman and doctor to decide; not you!

Whose "inconvenience" are you talking about? Yours? Many children die of disease and starvation every day; many in India and China kill their infants. Why aren't you concerned for them?

The present political issue is not whether the woman should have the choice, but rather whether the rest of us should be forced to pay for it with public money ... and whether this is a wise and truly necessary expenditure of public funds in a period of increasing deficits at all levels of government.

Good point, george. And I unerstand our government has been or wants to pay for abortions and birth control all around the world too. Am I right on that?

Non sequitur.

Actually, I feel sorry for your kids, based on the temperament, philosophy, reasoning ability and level of education you have demonstrated here. They never had a chance to be individuals.

Straw man

Nonsense. Conservatives are opposed to making a fair contribution to the education of all children. I remember some of the cat fights waged by the right on these boards and abuzz over eliminating music and art which the right saw as useless.

Conservatives are opposed to creating a pool to pay for health care which is the only fair way to guarantee health for all.

Conservatives cheer those who stalled the wages of 80% of the American work force for 30-plus years.

There are too many people on the planet and there have been too many for a century.

georgeob, WOW! You are really misinformed; Planned Parenthood help with women's health. As you should know, less than 3% for the funding of Planned Parenthood is used for abortions, but conservatives like you are making it as the primary issue to take away health care for women. You're spreading misinformation about abortion like the rest of conservatives who fail to address the real service to women from Planned Parenthood.

Why are you so unconcerned about women's health? Why do you want to destroy Planned Parenthood who provide health screenings, and other services to women?

From the journal Science:

Does Your Brain Bleed Red, White, and Blue?
by Greg Miller on 7 April 2011, 12:35 PM | Permanent Link | 6 Comments


Lefty or righty? A new study links a larger anterior cingulate cortex (left) to politically liberal views and a larger right amygdala to conservatism.

Politics can be a touchy topic, especially when it comes to neuroscience. Researchers who've dared to tackle questions about how people's political leanings might be reflected in the brain have often earned scoffs and scoldings from their colleagues. A provocative new study is likely to be no exception. It claims to find features of brain anatomy that differ between people who identify themselves as politically conservative or politically liberal.

Cognitive neuroscientist Ryota Kanai and colleagues at University College London recruited 90 student volunteers and had them rate their political philosophy on a five-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative. Then the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to get a look inside their brains. In a paper published online today in Current Biology, the team reports two main findings: political conservatives tend to have a larger right amygdala, a region involved in detecting threats and responding to fearful stimuli, whereas liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, an area that becomes active in situations involving conflict or uncertainty.

There was considerable overlap though. When the researchers looked only at the brain scans, Kanai says they could predict who was liberal and who was conservative with about 75% accuracy—much better than a coin toss but probably not good enough for any high-tech campaign tactics.

Kanai is at pains to make clear that the findings don't mean political views are "hard-wired" into the brain. He acknowledges that the data don't prove that these neuroanatomical differences actually cause political differences, but he suspects that they might play a role. He says psychological studies suggest that conservatives are more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and disgust, whereas liberals are more tolerant of situations involving conflict and uncertainty. (To armchair psychologists, this might explain some stereotypical behavior, such as the spike in blood pressure a hard-core conservative might experience when Fox News plays a new recording from Osama bin Laden, or the half-hour it might take an Earth-loving liberal to decide whether to buy the organic apple flown in from Chile or the local apple treated with pesticides.) Kanai speculates that subtle size differences in the amygdala and anterior cingulate might predispose people to particular "cognitive styles or personality traits" that in turn make them gravitate toward a particular worldview.

"It's provocative," says social cognitive neuroscientist David Amodio of New York University. Amodio is no stranger to political neurocontroversy. A paper he published in Nature Neuroscience in 2007 resulted in some hyperbolic headlines and punditry in the mainstream media and a critical backlash from skeptical neuroscience bloggers. In that study, when Amodio and colleagues used electroencephalography to investigate brain activity, they found a correlation between greater activity in the anterior cingulate and political liberalism. The picture that emerges from that work, Kanai's study, and other research is that "even complex political views are probably rooted in more basic psychological and brain processes," Amodio says.

It's an appealing story and a topic worth investigating, says cognitive neuroscientist Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania. But there's plenty of reason to be cautious, she says. For one, it's not clear what a bigger amygdala—or a bigger anything in the brain—actually means in terms of brain function and behavior. The research, she says, is unclear and often contradictory on this point.

Another problem is that most brain regions have multiple functions, Farah says: "Who says fear is the only function of the amygdala?" She notes that this brain region also responds to sexually arousing images and pictures of happy faces, and one recent study found a correlation between amygdala volume and the size of people's social networks. Likewise, the anterior cingulate cortex has been implicated in a long list of cognitive functions. By picking and choosing from the previous studies, "they're indulging in a bit of just-so storytelling," Farah says.

My immediate reaction is to suggest there is a two-way street here: that political thinking highlights certain parts of the brain as targeted exercise enlarges certain muscles.

Where did you get the 3% factoid? I doubt it in that Planned parenthood is all about limiting procreation.

Women participate in Medicare, Medicaid and employer health insurance programs on exactly the same basis as men. Given that rather obvious fact, on what basis do you assert that government funding of Planned Parenthood - a private organization - is an essential aspect of women's health?

Here's the latest info on Planned Parenthood from Planned Parenthood dtd march 2011. The 3% figure comes from this source, but there are others that show the same number. The link also provides what services they provide women (and men).

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/PPFA/PP_Services.pdf

I wonder how many women on Medicare really need family planning services.

But that's just me "niggling" I guess when I bet it's less than 3%.

Bullshit!

parados, According to Planned Parenthood's own site, it's actually less than 3% for abortions.

There again you throw out completely unfounded accustions that have no basis in fact. You should be ashamed of your insults you so freely throw around here. My children are responsible adults, law abiding and taxpaying citizens of this country that have more sense than you do in my opinion, ased upon your silly and liberal whacko posts here, pom. They work and are raising our grandchildren pretty well. I am proud of them. We have a good relationship with both.

They are not "unfounded" as you claim; your ignorance, lies, and inability to remember history is legend. Your kids must be as confused as you are!