What you call “left brain” x “rigth brain” is misleading. You fail to recognize that there is, at least an attempt to be rigorous and carefull in “left brain” thinking. Many times “from the gut” is just a cover to avoid rigor and care on thinking; a shortcut to prejudice and prejudgement. As I see, gender, race and religious discrimination come from “the gut”, don’t they?

I can not in a reasonable mind attribute her numerous quotations to someone either coy or driven enough to run as a VP on a major ticket.

In short, I’m hoping she remains of interest to you, and I find your investigative skepticism refreshing. Unlike me, you tend to avoid romanticized and theoretical interlude as a replacement for making concrete points.

In regards to your penultimate paragraph, it seems like you are saying I shouldn’t speculate on… something… but I can’t figure out what it is that I shouldn’t be speculating on. Could you please clarify?

Its one thing to have an idea, or an idle but seemingly promising thought. Its another thing to be able to articulate either adequately when millions of people are watching live. I’ll happily afford her that handicap.

As I avoid ‘consensus thinking’ as if it were a disease, I’m keeping an open mind. However, she rarely fails to produce evidence that a village in Alaska is missing an indecisive and broadly incoherent idiot.

In regards to your post, you don’t know your capabilities or resolve until confronted with problems that they might resolve. Most members of the Donner party would reject eating human flesh if the question was posed hypothetically prior to their plight. Speculation into such extremes, therefore, is a waste of oxygen with no possible factual outcome. Have you ever been in a situation that promised death or eminent disfiguration where there is no positive outcome?

However, it does make for challenging and very interesting reading! I’m enjoying your blog, hopefully you can equally enjoy my heckling.

I think that it’s more complex than just “people who are [left-brain] smart are bad!”, it’s “making decisions only based on facts is dangerous”. (I can actually agree with that: I want people in charge who are good at both left-brain AND right-brain thinking!)

I hadn’t really thought about the crunchy-granola wing of the liberals being right-brain. I’ll have to think about that.

And absolutely, I agree that the left-brain conservatives are NOT running the GOP right now.

Interesting about right-brainy “don’t kill the baby”. Overpopulation certainly is bad for the planet, but people really don’t want to kill their babies in order to save the planet.

http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/11/16/killing-babies-saving-the-world/

Highly worth listening to. The moral question is based on the last episode of MASH, where (apparently…I haven’t actually seen the episode) there are a bunch of villagers hiding somewhere from the enemy. One villager has an infant with a cold who will cough and give away the villagers’ hiding place (and certain death from the enemy). The only way out of this if the villager smothers her baby.

Logically, this is a no-brainer—kill your baby and save the village, or don’t kill your baby and everyone dies (including you and your baby). But most people when asked (especially those with babies) said that they couldn’t do it (including me).

Why? It is apparently because of two conflicting moral imperatives fighting for dominance in our puny brains. There is the left-brainy logical morality, which says “save more people by killing one”, and the right-brainy intuitive morality, which says “don’t kill your own baby”.

In this case, the right-brainy morality wins. Unfortunately, though, most of the big problems that we face these days, such as global warming, nuclear war, over-fishing, global poverty, etc, are just not very easily solved using right-brained morality. Gut instinct will not find a way out of any of these global crises (whether it comes from the left or the right).

I do think there are a lot of left-brainy conservatives out there. Conservatives that I still don’t like very much, or agree with, but who at least I have some intellectual respect for them. These tend to be libertarian economist thinkers/writers/lobbyists. One of my favorites to read is Randall O’Toole http://ti.org/antiplanner/, mostly because of the entertaining and lively commenting on the site.

Ironically, these left-brainy conservatives often complain that liberals are too right-brainy (they don’t use the term, but they are saying the same thing). The stereotyped liberal that they describe is the idealist who wants to save the planet by driving a prius, thinks corporations are evil, and wants world peace, but doesn’t think deeply about any of this.

These people exist (because I know some), but unlike right-brainy conservatives, they are not currently the driving force behind a political party.