You Mean They Really Are Whiny Ass Titty Babies?
Mar 20th, 2006 at 7:01 am by Susie
How to spot a baby conservative:
But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids’ personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it’s unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.
A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.
Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.
Some insecure kids probably blow up frogs as a way of showing they’re superior and powerful, also. Later on they progress to humans and entire nations………………..
This is off-topic Susie, but Washington Journal featured Danielle Pletka of the A.E.I. this morning. I know she’s one of your favorites, as mine, and just thought I’d let you know. Since Congress is “on vacation” there’s a chance C-Span will rerun Washington Journal at 10am EST.
Or maybe the whiny kids are whiny because they have rigid, authoritarian and unempathetic parents who aren’t very responsive to their needs and feelings, or who even antagonize them. Maybe they act whiny in school because it is a safer environment than home.
Before we moved to a different city, our family was friendly with a fundamentalist family who, like us, has a young kid with Aspergers and OCD (Obessive-Compulsive Disorder). Their kid couldn’t leave their cat alone. So what did they do? They didn’t look for ways to separate the kid and the cat, didn’t reward the kid when she left the cat alone, no, they got a second cat so she would have twice the opportunity to annoy cats (well, actually they got the second cat because they thought the first one needed company. But they obviously didn’t give any thought about how this would affect their kid). Then they hit the kid with a wooden spoon when she *misbehaved* and annoyed a cat, or told the kid it served her right when a cat attacked her back and let her cry by herself.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that the sins of the father are visited upon the children. Or something like that.
Yes, as forecast, C-Span is re-running the Danielle Pletka portion of their Washington Journal program.
I didn’t mention it before, but she’s wearing a chic chiffon scarf, no doubt to cover that neck of hers that vaguely resembles crepe paper. And for once, her hair doesn’t look like her colleagues at the A.E.I. gave her a “swirlie” (sticking her head in a toilet bowl and flushing) before letting her appear.
[/end gay snark]
Curiously, Jung’s theory of archetypes has a similar prediction.
that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country.
I miss Berkeley so much. The best 10 years of my life, and that was just Freshman year. (Kidding, I was in gradual school there, and even that was only two years, the other eight was just the pleasure of living in the Bay Area.)
I do miss Berkeley.
Alas, I miss Berkeley, too - the Berkeley of the late 80s to mid-90s. Groovy, ca.
I miss Berkeley too - was born there (in a commune of course) and college in the late 90s. My mom tells me that I was an angelic child until I was four and then I got really whiny - that would be around when my sister was born, and my mom was juggling 4 children under the age of five, and I am guessing that the level of attention i received dropped rapidly. I would say I grew up to be somewhat insecure, and also somewhat conservative (in the not liking to take chances sense) but my politics are raging liberal. Maybe it had to do with the very nuturing hippie school my parents sent me too that was very nurturing (never whined there) and taught us that the number one virtues were to be compassionate to other people and being openminded and nonconformist.
“I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best,” he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.
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doesnt this guy get that becoming a staunch party member in China is the conservative thing to do?
I don’t think any of this is as simple as our little “psychology today” anecdotes and studies would try make things out to be, though it does seem that, while we all seem to want to belong to some group(s), the fundie conservative types are comfortable living in an ideologically defined world that hasn’t doesn’t embrace complexities introduced by science, facts, homosexuality, cultural diversity, etc.
My brother, who is no dummy by the way, has trouble believing that Karl Rove is a cynic, and prefers to think that I am cynical because I ascribe cynical motives to Rove. I think this is due to the fact that he knows me better than he knows Rove, and he lives in Colorado Springs, and is surrounded by fundies and works at Shriever AFB, and it would be to painful to be a Bush/Iraq war critic in that context. I, on the other hand lived in Berkeley for 25 years (especially before the late 1980’s) was an island (oasis maybe) of Socialism that had co-ops all over the place, and commie rags in the newsstands, Country Joe’s mom as city auditor (I believe), and it was difficult to be an outspoken Republican for the same basic reason; people would think you were abnormal and you would be ostracized.
“Block . . . reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics.”
Which is why the main GOP message of the past 50 years has been, “You have so much to be insecure about.”
Right Now I Am More Proud Of My Daughters’ Independence Than I Could Ever Be…….
…
They were probably more likely whiny assed formula fed babies…
WHINY ASS TITTY BABIES…
grow up to be Cowards, a.ka. Republicans: But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part……
People can deal with insecurities in different ways.
Whining is not inherently political.
The problem lies with the old people, not the young.
[...] Via Susie at Sub-G, a long-term survey in Berkeley finds that whiny babies grow up conservative: [...]
though I would not equate communist china (the ones in charge) with liberal. There is a distinction to be made between liberal and left wing.
gosh, joe frank, you “wouldn’t equate CC with liberal”?
thanks, man. i feel so much better. i mean, Communist China does promulgate almost all liberal policies: forced sterilization, corrupt elites feathering their own nests, censorship, a distinct lack of respect for human rights, suppresion of minorities…
yup, sounds like one of our major political belief systems all right.
oh, yeah, not the liberal one, though.
idiot.
J.B.:
What hippie school did your parents send you to? I live in the Bay Area and have kids heading toward high school. They had a great school for many years, and are currently in a charter school, but if it doesn’t work out, we were going to set up a homeschool curriculum. Alternatives you know of?
And, by the way, speaking as an East Bayer, we’d love to have any former Berkleyites back. The tides are changing; we need good community members.
I lived in Berkeley for six years, and in that town being a Democrat is as far RIGHT as you can get on the political spectrum. What a shock to move back East. Suddenly we went from being considered the local conservatives to being considered the local liberals, without changing a single opinion.
Well, F A Hayek could have told you that much about Conservatives in his essay entitled “Why I am not a Conservative.”
Thus,
“This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such,[5] while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead. There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed strong. But the conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about. It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people’s frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change “orderly.”
“This fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces is closely related to two other characteristics of conservatism: its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of economic forces. Since it distrusts both abstract theories and general principles,[6] it neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy. Order appears to the conservative as the result of the continuous attention of authority, which, for this purpose, must be allowed to do what is required by the particular circumstances and not be tied to rigid rule. A commitment to principles presupposes an understanding of the general forces by which the efforts of society are co-ordinated, but it is such a theory of society and especially of the economic mechanism that conservatism conspicuously lacks.”
http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/fah1.html
I’d have to read the study–the article seems to mix the concepts of being outgoing, being whiny, and being confident, which are not always the same things and would need to be well-defined and objectively observable for the study to mean much. Also, I wonder how many people’s personal political beliefs are fully formed by the age of 24-25. I’d love to see the same study at age 45.
I also think Neil in #10 hits on an important point - there are places in this country where being a Democrat or a liberal is the easy, conformist thing to do. Ridiculous or not, conservatives have been trying very hard to portray conservatism as the rebellious, anti-establishment thing to do on college campuses, with some success.
Personally, I’d like to see it broken down by astrological signs.
You may be on to something there with liking to see it broken down by sun signs, Susie. I’d like to see a study done to determine if there’s any correlation with those self-identified as Republican, the sun sign Virgo, and the planet Uranus. I suspect it might be a strong relationship.
” There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings”
Uh huh… no reason to think that at all huh… yeah, if you’re a stupid cunt that’s trying to make justifications for an agenda.
My this certainly stirred up the crowd. I’ve been in Berkeley since 1965 and we have the following:
Good schools.
Organic produce.
The best restaurants in the East Bay.
Good weather.
A generally progressive city government.
Sounds just horrible don’t it.
[...] I know, three political posts in a row, but what can I say? It’s been that kind of week and this is just too priceless to pass up - a recent study has shown that whiny, nasty kids grow up to be rigid corrupt conservatives - yes it’s true and it’s all right here at You Mean They Really Are Whiny Ass Titty Babies? [...]
[...] Maybe I’m overestimating this: it’s a a momentary arc of activism and Bush, in his magisterial compassiontude, will remember Spanish and defuse the situation. George Will thinks there has to be a first time for that, right, the (objectively) Worst President Ever not totally fucking blowing it? Maybe, not kidding this time, for really reals, it’ll backfire and HELP the GOP! Like you’ve always wanted! Just gotta start working the phones, the blowdryers. Or maybe, if you’re a pudgy, yearning young conservative activist, watching those massed throngs in the streets, Americans, somehow, in American streets, you feel like maybe there’s an ill wind blowing. Something that cuts right through the smarm and self-satisfaction, chafing the insults, the slights, the past you’d hoped to put behind you. A wind portending an eerily familiar future, where nobody listens to you anymore and you’re back to nodding along to Art Bell in your basement and plotting against Hillary as you iron your red ties again and again and again, just, you know, in case you need them. [...]
I thought Big Brother was a conervative.
What is with this “Hi (my name) support this site today”? Never in a million years! Get rid of that crap.
Graduated Berkely in 99 and moved to the Mid west. I miss it so bad my toes curl when I ponder it. At work, here in MI I am surrounded by formerly whiny babies who grew up to be gun toting cowards.
I also note that when my 6 year old was 2 years old, he walked out the back door and through our back yard (660 feet deep) without ever looking back to see if we were there. Confident. I am also confident he will be a leftist.
I commonly wear a shirt I made that says, ” I am a Liberal and I can KICK YOUR ASS!” (6 foot six 250 pounds– it’s believable even if not really true). I was a silent baby.