The average American reads at an elementary school level, and many are functionally illiterate. Here is a case in point.
Fascism bad.
Submitted 6 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/ea316b6d-3f57-40fb-a8b7-6489a2d33fd1.jpeg
Comments
El_guapazo@lemmy.world 5 minutes ago
sangeteria@lemmy.ml 23 minutes ago
who need they amygdalussy ate
ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 minutes ago
Kazakhstan has superior amygdala. All other countries have inferior amygdala
cogman@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
fartographer@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Just like alligators. They’re so ornery because they have all them teeth and no toothbrush
huquad@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
Well looks like mama was wrong!
rants_unnecessarily@piefed.social 2 hours ago
I understood that reference
BierSoggyBeard@feddit.online 2 hours ago
Which should mean that it would be implicated in conservative thought processes, being as they are so fear-and-anger-driven in everything they do.
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 hour ago
it’s a bit of a “chicken and egg” problem, but yes studies show that conservatives typically have an overactive amygdala. now, is it overactive because they’re conservative, or are they conservative because it’s overactive? hard to say.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
we cant give in to the thinkers!
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 hour ago
No worries, conservatives have no use for thinking anyways.
baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de 3 hours ago
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.
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 13 minutes ago
that doesn’t stop me from being leftist
It’s because you’re autistic!
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 hours ago
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
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 11 minutes ago
The fear of dying of starvation should motivate you to contribute in society ::: spoiler spoiler /s :::
SoloPhoenyx@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
To be fair, they want everyone but themselves personally to suffer and die.
belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 2 hours ago
Its a death cult
deacon@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
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.
AlexLost@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
I feel your shame friend. We have so little opportunity to do the right thing, and we still fail.
Kuori@hexbear.net 3 hours ago
Still struggling with the compassion for animals that I eat
not trying to preach but in my experience the only thing that soothes your conscience once you’re to this point is to go vegan
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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
bobo@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
Still struggling with the compassion for animals that I eat.
Drop acid and watch Samsara
SethTaylor@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Tiny amygdala
Big dick
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
HA HA take that COMMIE you’re braver than me due to your genetic superiority! ^oh ^wait
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
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
anotherspinelessdem@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
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.
jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
It’s still just as funny as the flat Earthers that keep accidentally proving that the Earth is round
And somehow they never go “oh shit, maybe I should reevaluate my beliefs based on the evidence” – instead it’s “well the evidence must be wrong”
j4yc33@piefed.social 6 hours ago
Fun fact: Conservativism can be linked to lead and/or mercury exposure.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 5 hours ago
Fear is, famously, an excellent impetus for rational decision-making.
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
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.
bizarroland@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
Wilco@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
I am guilty of thinking about the same thing when it comes to “Conservatives”. I catch myself wondering if they are actually human or if they are all mentally retarded due to lead poisoning.
Around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago we had other species of humans running around with us, like Neanderthals and over a dozen other species if you go back further. These would have seemed like aliens to our ancestors. What if Conservatives are a slightly different version of human.
The lead poisoning thing actually makes sense for the Baby Boomer generationand Generation X. We used leaded gasoline during their lifetimes. These people could all be mentally deficient … and we are letting them run the world when they should be in a mental hospital somewhere.**
thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 25 minutes ago
Honestly is more surprising any human is relatively rational. We are animals after all. I’m starting to realize thinking deeply about anything might be the exception not the rule. Most people are idiots
ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 minutes ago
It’s really hard to like people the more you see of their behavior and “intelligence”
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 13 minutes ago
Same human species, different traumas. Conservatives have daddy issues, while we have mommy issues
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 6 minutes ago
what if I don’t have either?
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 57 minutes ago
We have social media instead of lead poisoning now. Youtube tries to pull me into the alt-right pipeline bimonthly now.
ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 minutes ago
for a second I read that as “bismuthly”
j4yc33@piefed.social 6 hours ago
Fun fact: Conservativism can be linked to Lead and/or Mercury exposure
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
ceenote@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Without clicking I knew who you linked to.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Anyone who is 50+ is lead brained.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 hours ago
No wonder Republicans are so phobic of everything. They got overinflated amygdalas.
Derpenheim@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
Excuse my, thats amygdala. Its very different from amygdala.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 hours ago
Ah-meeg-doll-uh vs Uh-mig-dull-uh.
(seriously heard it pronounced the first way in so many BB videos)
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
zd9@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Conservatives are more afraid of everything, and respond in anger. How the fuck is that “better”?
Soup@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Those are “manly” emotions! But also don’t forget that we are better for running countries because we’re so calm and cool.
katkit@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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.
grue@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
How the fuck is [being scared and angry] “better”?
Through the power of sarcasm.
Chakravanti@monero.town 4 hours ago
Depends on who supplies their dope.
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
I credit an intense compassion for animals and resulting veganism to my autism.
Just wanted to put that in the thread without making it a direct response to anyone. Sometimes it can be incredibly alienating and disconcerting to encounter people online who say they can’t be vegan because they’re autistic. It’s a very diverse spectrum with a multitude of manifestations, and I’d like to go on record as proof that it swings toward the positive and not just the negative.
Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org 1 hour ago
Same :)
gray@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
Amygdala’s outfits in “A Phantom Menace” were amazing
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
Amidalin.
Amygdalia.
A McDonalds.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 4 hours ago
A man
A plan
Amygdala
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Isn’t right-wing views correlate with cognitive decline?
4am@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
There were actually some studies that showed either an over-active amygdala causing anxiety or and under-developed rest of the brain couldn’t cope with the output of the amygdala or something to that effect; and that made people experiencing it more susceptible to conservatism.
So it’s like another dimension of the autism spectrum, except you’re just scared as shit of everything everyone tells you. Better believe in the same God as everyone around you, just in case.
definitely_AI@feddit.online 20 seconds ago
The level of dumb necessary to state what’s said in OP’s meme is just staggering and emblematic of the right- misunderstand everything and boil it down to the most basic YES vs NO proposition possible, then blame everyone else.
ComRed@hexbear.net 3 hours ago
When you claim to have a strong ability to sense danger, so you join the demonic pedophile death-cult.
Carl@hexbear.net 3 hours ago
the brain is plastic, so it seems far more likely to me that being in conservative circles causes the amygdala to enlarge than the opposite
SoloPhoenyx@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I’m suspicious of damn near everyone and am still somehow liberal.
unemployedclaquer@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
Stay close to the tree line. Learn to identify plants with poisonous oils. Stockpile the leaves that are like paper. If you must run a fire, use clean burning fuels, to avoid disclosing location. Dig a deep hole and build a privacy wall out of poisonous vines.
SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
It may have been for something else, but it’s weirdly applicable here…
copandballtorture@hexbear.net 3 hours ago
Nice to see conservatives were able to rebrand the “conservatives have over-active amygdala and are scared of everything for no reason” articles
culpritus@hexbear.net 5 hours ago
I’m afraid of urban density, diversity, genders and social progress. That makes me superior.
Fear is the mind killer. Long live the fighters.
taiyang@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Since we’re sharing fun facts, conservatism and authoritarianism is unsurprisingly correlated with high levels of obedience in things like the Milgrim shock experiment replications. Something akin to 90% compared to the original 60% (which was already quite high since they only had white men at the time).
They’re also more likely to choose selfish options in things like the prisoners dilemma, too!
grue@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
(Edit, if you wanna read more there’s an open source textbook I use: opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/ )
Let me guess: illegal in Florida?
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Weird flex but ok
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
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.
Zombiepirate@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
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 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.
blackbrook@mander.xyz 4 hours ago
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.
Manjushri@piefed.social 5 hours ago
Having enlarged and/or over active amygdalas would go a long way to explaining a lot of traits expressed by conservatives. That includes their fear of going to going to the grocery store without a gun on their hip.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Let’s just say I get scared real easy.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 6 hours ago
That's actually interesting, and I'd love to see the studies behind that (and then see if I can find out how my own brain is structured).
The_Grinch@hexbear.net 4 hours ago
What’s this “mutational load in the DNA” nonsense supposed to mean?
definitely_AI@feddit.online 2 minutes ago
The better educated you are, the more left leaning you tend to be: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/
Conservatives tend to be dismissive of science and empirical evidence: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160713172717.htm
Higher verbal IQ correlates with liberal attitudes: https://www.psypost.org/verbal-iq-predicts-political-participation-and-liberal-attitudes-twice-as-strongly-as-performance-iq/
Whatever this dumb shit is, is a reaction to that. As usual, they project their own shortcomings on their enemies.
In any case, what it comes down to is basic empathy and morality. If you care for others, you tend to vote left. If you care for only yourself and your self-interests, you vote right. There is no debating that, it’s stated right there in the fucking ideology.