Conservative Are Whiners. Who Knew?

This scare pull-quote from today's Toronto Star:

Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand ...

Of course, the "study" was undertaken by a University of California-Berkeley professor who was "studying" a batch of Berkeley pre-schoolers over a protracted period of time. Hard to get an objective study done in a universe whose members all live within a "nuclear-free zone." But what the hell...

The Star story is actually fairly even-handed, and includes defenses of the study, as well as a strong rebuttal from another professor:

"I found [the study] to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said... 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.

Indeed.

It's amazing the number of "studies" that have come out since the Y2K elections that attempt, via shoddy research, questionable sampling, dubious methodology, etc., to "prove" that conservatives are really rotten, subnormal buffoons whose ideas, such as they are, are beneath contempt and therefore not worthy of even passing consideration. Such "studies" are, in fact, Gramscian attempts (often surprisingly successful) to politicize the last bastion of objective study in the American university system—the sciences.

For the hard left, science is the last frontier. Having already wrecked literary culture by theorizing it to death; having destroyed classical music by institutionalizing atonalism as the only acceptable means of expression; having trivialized art by obliterating any objective standards of excellence; and having utterly destroyed the vitality of American drama by workshopping and propagandizing it to death, our Marxist destructors are determined to obliterate the last academic disciplines worthy of respect by trivializing each field with snitty studies whose lack of high seriousness can only transform the sciences, like the arts, into objects of ridicule.

And how about "global warming" as interpreted by internationally renowned Inuit experts in today's above-the-fold piece in the Washington Post? Don't get me started...