I felt the urge to post something today after having two very different but equally surprising conversations. One left me disappointed; the other gave me hope.
More on the flip...
I got to talking politics with some people I know - folks I expected to be fairly liberal, for what it's worth. I explained to them that I used to be apolitical, but lately, one team just seems to come across as so much, well... better. They were shocked I was talking about the dems.
The bad: One of them actually said to me that she hates Dems because Bill Clinton polluted a generation of children. The irony of that phrasing left me nearly speechless, but I managed to let her know that I was far more concerned about a war than a blowjob. She didn't seem to agree.
The good: I was on the phone with another friend of mine, this one staunchly conservative - a reasonable guy with whom I disagree about some things, and a guy with whom I've had numerous political conversations in the past. Without my prompting, he let me know: he's scared about this domestic spying thing. He doesn't like it, and he doesn't trust it.
The ugly: This was my first diary... hooray for me ;) Just sharing something I found interesting; hopefully someone else gains something from it as well.
And speaking of interesting - bias and cognitive dissonance aren't anything new, but this is among the first fMRI studies I've seen on the subject: NYT: A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious.