So, the amygdala doesn’t just impact fear response, it also does anger, anxiety, and stress. An overactive amygdala negatively impacts your ability to think clearly.
Just like alligators. They’re so ornery because they have all them teeth and no toothbrush
Well looks like mama was wrong!
HA HA take that COMMIE you’re braver than me due to your genetic superiority! ^oh ^wait
I didn’t have fascists scientifically proving that they’re cowards on my 2026 bingo card.
It’s still just as funny as the flat Earthers that keep accidentally proving that the Earth is round
It’s still just as funny as the flat Earthers that keep accidentally proving that the Earth is round
Which is itself extra funny because I believe they both knew this and measured its circumference in ancient Egypt using two faraway towers, if I’m remembering that episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos correctly.
Eratosthenes, to within 10% of the modern value. They think, I don’t think they’re 100% on the exact size of his measurement unit. Stadia?
Fear is, famously, an excellent impetus for rational decision-making. (/s just in case)
Fear and rage force you to use unreliable heuristics instead of critical thinking and analysis resulting in poorer choices, it’s why so much propaganda relies on triggering those emotional states to get you to stop thinking and accept the message. Less fear in decision making is a beneficial mutation.
I’ve been saying this forever, but, like, these people really need to go back and reread Chicken Little. They’re getting Fox News, getting scared, and reacting based off of what Fox is telling them, and not what the Chicken Little’s are telling them.
The sky is not falling.
Take a deep breath, calm the fuck down, and chill. Everything’s okay. As long as we stop freaking out.
Ha ha ha, Chicken Little is way above the reading level of most Conservatives.
reread Chicken Little
If those people could read, they’d be … less upset, I guess.
Except everything isn’t okay… Everything is actually really, really bad. Not for me personally, as a white cis man everything is fine. But for so many people the world is a bad and dangerous place right now, and that terrifies and stresses me the fuck out.
But, and hear me out, if the people that were constantly freaking out and terrified all of the time were to chill a little bit, the world would improve dramatically, almost instantaneously.
We are in a period of time where calmness is the most vital thing for our leaders and for the people.
And if you can’t make it yourself, store bought is fine.
“I ain’t no chicken, ‘n’ I gots the truck nuts t’ prove it!”
I’m autistic and have an oversized amygdala but that doesn’t stop me from being leftist. I just feel compassion for everyone human. Still struggling with the compassion for animals that I eat.
ironically i fear the SHIT out of right wingers, because they seem to actively want me to suffer before i die, for the crime of not being able to have a job
To be fair, they want everyone but themselves personally to suffer and die.
Which is itself a form of suffering, imagine the humanity they miss out on and what you’d be without it. Liberalism and fascism are ideologies that subsist on the concept that there is an imaginary amount of violence that can be inflicted outward to relieve internal suffering.
Its a death cult
Veganism is my unattended moral compromise. I am positive that future generations will look at us and our factory farming and, aghast, see us as the monsters as we are - much like we look back at slaveowners, even those who were against the institution at the time.
Since I am not living in or near the wild and not hunting for my own food, it is clear to me that veganism is the only real moral choice, and yet I still participate.
I am complicit in this delightful supreme pizza and complicit in this breaded chicken sandwich.
Factory farming is the problem, not animal husbandry. If the whole world went vegan, do you think the vegetables we eat would not be altered to better serve yield rather than quality? Do you think pesticides would not be used in staggering levels? Do you think vegetables aren’t alive so it’s okay to eat them? If it doesn’t have a face, it’s cool to eat? Life is sustained by consuming other life, the world over. I agree that industrial farming is disgusting and cruel, but not just to animals.
Farming is already optimized for yield.
Not to the levels you can expect if it is all industrialized. You are correct though. A strawberry from 50 years ago tastes a million times better than the monstrosities we buy today as a quick example.
Trust me, the more explorations I do on the nature of consciousness, the more I wrestle with all of that.
I don’t believe that it is inherently wrong to kill in order to eat. But as a species we don’t. Which isn’t to say there aren’t members of our species who very much do still need to kill to eat.
But I don’t need to kill to eat, and I’ve outsourced that killing so it feels like more of an abstraction than it is. I can at the very least acknowledge this.
Which I think is almost worse… think about concentration/extermination camps (which I think our animal industry is basically)
And it’s perfectly healthy to be vegan (maybe even more healthy at this point when done right, than meat consumption).
My main reason though for that is less moral than just wanting to be less wasteful, i.e. meat is just inefficient. I predict that we at some point will move past meat consumption, it’s just not necessary, even when considering taste…
I feel your shame friend. We have so little opportunity to do the right thing, and we still fail.
I feel bad for the forks and spoons in the drawer which didn’t get used that day… My amygdala must be an absolute fuckin’ HOG
Still struggling with the compassion for animals that I eat.
Drop acid and watch Samsara
POV:
You just aggravated someone with an ‘undersized’ amygdala.
I’d say that amygdala is regular sized, since it’s activating a fight response
I sure hope that kid’s doing well.
Conservatives are more afraid of everything, and respond in anger. How the fuck is that “better”?
Those are “manly” emotions! But also don’t forget that we are better for running countries because we’re so calm and cool.
One could frame this as “Leftists are more naive and reckless, while Conservatives are cautious”. I wouldn’t, but I can see someone make that argument.
How the fuck is [being scared and angry] “better”?
Through the power of sarcasm.
Ah, the typical nazi idea of correlating random body measurements with complex behavioral and emotional patterns.
You mean the Brit/American eugenics idea.
Hitler was a great fan of these racists so he sent a dr Mengele to study the superior Nordic race at Carnegie’s American Eugenics Society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eugenics_Society_Exhibit_(1930s)._Image_from_Wellcome_Library.jpg
Amygdala’s wardrobe in “A Phantom Menace” was overactive
Amidalin.
Amygdalia.
A McDonalds.
A man
A plan
Amygdala
Went to a Mediterranean restaurant for dinner with my wife. We celebrated her birthday, and so decided to check the dessert menu. We generally don’t get dessert, just never really lie thing, but this menu has a dessert called amygdalopita, which piques my interest. Why would they name it after part of the brain?
And so upon further research, we discovered that the Greek word αμύγδαλο (amýgdalo) means almond. And this really got my wheels turning, because it brought back memory of EMT classes, way back in like 2003, where they talked about the amygdala being named such due tonit being almond shaped.
So I like a dessert that not only tasted great, but also helped me make connections, maybe fire off some neurons I hadn’t in a while.
In Flemish/Dutch the toncills (Tonsillae palatinae) are called almonds
You ate brains for dessert?!
OMG they are so detached from reality that they are bragging about being terrified?
Conservatives don’t know anything about the person they voted for. They don’t know anything about how their government functions. They don’t know anything about their Constitution.
I promise they don’t know what an amygdala is or what it does.
“I’m afraid more often and that’s why I’m a terrible person!”
Tiny amygdala
Big dick
Hat3rs will h8
Sanders 2028
Nah please, we need younger actually representatives of the population, not ancient people (as much as I like Sanders). There’s various young progressive candidates that are suitable when the Dems allow them…
who need they amygdalussy ate
I’m willing to bet no one has ever said this before.
I’m just like Ghoulia from Monster High:
- smart as af
- gives good brain
- wants good brain
- massive, huge, thick, Juicy amygdalas
- keeps it sloppppy
- incoherent
- scolioSIS
- dresses cunt
- pallid corpse blue
We’re literally twins
I’ve seen some interesting discussion of this linked to the idea of survive/thrive strategies. Is the world a dangerous place that calls for avoiding risks and protecting what you have, or is it full of opportunities and calls for exploring and being open to novelty? Neither inclination is fundamentally wrong. But I’m not sure how to reconcile that with modern “rightists” who want to burn down the system and aren’t conservative in the lowercase-C sense.
But I’m not sure how to reconcile that with modern “rightists” who want to burn down the system and aren’t conservative in the lowercase-C sense.
The Republican party (and conservatism as a movement) are full-blown reactionaries. I like this passage from Corey Robin’sThe Reactionary Mind:
People who aren’t conservative often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess. It used to be one of the great virtues of the left that it alone understood the often zero- sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they— and only they— who speak for them. “All conservatism begins with loss,” Andrew Sullivan rightly notes, which makes conservatism not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the party of the loser.
The chief aim of the loser is not— and indeed cannot be— preservation or protection. It is recovery and restoration.
And from another section:
There’s a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is.
I just now saw this and… that is a much erudite explanation than I gave… I will have to check out this Corey Robin.
I think these ideas, and what I said, are mutually true.
What do you think?
Basically, yes, conservatives either literally are losers or fear loss, to horrifically paraphrase Robin… and also, their replacement identity, their group identity that has supplanted their personal identity, which includes being directed to war against certain ideas and concepts, well, they can’t not perform those ideas, otherwise, its another existentual criss.
First, they lost or failed at something core to their personal identity, then they subsume themself into the aggrieved group identity… and if they renege against or fail at the performance of the group identity… well now they have another existential crisis, suffer another kind of identity loss.
Conservatism, as a trauma response.
I just also want to note the immense cognitive dissonance between the actual, fear-based conservative mindset of ‘zero-sum’… and their purported belief in the ‘free market’, much of which totally fails to be any kind of logically coherent without the idea that… an unregulated market generally (or even always) leads to a ‘positive-sum’ situation.
They lie about how they actually think, and tell you the thing that very often actually is zero-sum in reality… is broadly mutually beneficial… and that you’re wrong/evil if you disagree.
Its… all projection.
Quite a logical short circuit.
You should definitely read the book if it’s a topic that interests you; it’s the best overview of conservatism that I’ve read. I’d say you’re pretty well aligned with what he wrote within, too.
Fear of non-conformity.
They value being in some kind of ‘tribe’ to a literally irrational extent.
Hence, black and white, ingroup vs outgroup thinking.
Then combine that with half of them hate themselves (mostly because of the peer pressure that comes from their tribe) and are literally in a suicidal apocalyptic death cult.
So when the death cult says ‘destroy’, they don’t want to lose their group identity, because without that, they are nothing, so, they destroy.
Well they are afraid of the system, which they think is out to get them. See white nationalists who claim they are being persecuted, “deep state”, various conspiracy theories, need for guns for self protection, etc, etc. I don’t see anything hard to reconcile.
Conservatism typically assumes that much of the world is a zero-sum game, so for one to prosper someone else must be worse off. Instead of them collaborating for a better outcome.
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