You guys are completely missing the most earthshaking information that will cause a serious rethinking across the board. And here it is.
Prof Rees and his team, who carried out the research for the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, looked at the brain make up of the Labour MP Stephen Pound and Alan Duncan, the Conservative Minister of State for International Development using a scanner.
They studied 2 members of gov't and found brains in both!
OMF'ingG!
If they actually have brains, we should all have fear as this means they are vastly more dangerous than we ever thought!
All joking aside, this is an interesting exercise but the sampling is vastly limited IMO to draw any absolutes one way or the other. Both so-called liberals and conservatives can be driven by fear, risk averse or even at times throw caution to the wind. Both liberals and conservatives for example use fear based politics during election cycles and voters on both sides react accordingly to this stimuli but as so often is the case, the true facts behind the fear driven propaganda are a whole other matter.
What I'd like to see these researchers do now is to seek out some remote tribal society that is not so driven by man created psychological propaganda and man created liberal/conservative constructs and see what they find there. If they find it then, I'd say there's merit to continue but if they find nothing at all and further studies show the same results in so-called organized, civilized soceities, then our brains are evolving to environmental conditions rather than just being in it's natural state.
There is a risk averse and throwing caution to the wind make up in people and at this point I'm not willing to ascribe a political belief one way or the other on it. Besides, from a left/right perspective, the right in our present day is considered the side of politics who want to vastly limit gov't but then if this is always so true, then explain a true champion of the left like Kirkpatrick Sale who advocates nullification and succession from the Federal State? What about Pat Bucannan who has been solidly against the Iraq war and hasn't bought everything the fear mongers preach about muslims? Explain Ron Paul? Explain Glenn Greenwald or feminist Naomi Wolfe whose catching hell for talking with and talking positive about some folks in the tea party movement?
Politicans don't always believe the fear they preach but instead it's just a mechanism they use to get elected, stay elected and for otherwise purely political ends. And they all do it, every one of them. Humanbeings across the board focus vastly more on negatives than positives, we seem wired that way IMO. Study people outside this false stimuli of politicized and propagandized society and then let's talk again when those results are in!
jmo