I am Not as Liberal as I Once Believed

[lavender]

 

[Problem Child]

It's from hanging out with me.

*you are under my spell*

 

[lavender]

 

[Never]

How are you not as liberal as you once believed?

 

[Purple Haze]

Yeah, I know what you mean. My sister is way left. When I talk politics with her, my conservative hair stands up. There isn't much of it, but you can see it from space. I start quoting Paul Harvey.

What's with 100 monkeys?

 

[lavender]

 

[Laurel]

I read an interesting metaphor somewhere that compared the political spectrum to a clock. Direct center is 6 o'clock, with Left at 9 o'clock and Right at 3 o'clock. Go past 9 and you're Far Left; go past 3 and you're Far Right. And if you go as far as you can left, or as far as you can right...you end up in exactly the same place.

If you were a citizen under Hitler or under Stalin, you were oppressed, and you suffered, period. Didn't matter that Hitler was a Fascist or Stalin was a Communist. You as a citizen still had a shitty life.

 

[Svedish_Chef]

You should come out here... I'll introduce you to my friend... no he would scare the fuck out of you so far it would gallop round the earth and run into you again.

 

[p_p_man]

This sounds a bit like...

I mean this was one hell of a conversation. It ranged from drug policy, increased enlightenment through shrooms, to globalization and the negative aspects of capitalism. I felt like a member of the fucking Heritage Foundation next to her. Sheesh!

100 Monkey theory is about collective consciousness. Long explanation. I'm going to do more research on it myself. I think it's a bunk theory with fucked up stats to back it up.

 

[p_p_man]

100 Monkey theory is about collective consciousness. Long explanation. I'm going to do more research on it myself. I think it's a bunk theory with fucked up stats to back it up.

Sory that was me pressing Enter by mistake!

This sounds a bit like race memory where deep in our subconsious we all have the same memories going back before Man could stand on two legs.

Some theorists say that is why we all have the same fears.

 

[Dillinger]

The Hundred Monkey Theory basically says that when one hundred monkeys discover a new way of doing something then all other monkeys, as a species - even if physically isolated from the monkeys that started doing the thing in the first place - will somehow acquire the same new knowledge.

This theory is based on a scientific study conducted in the 1950's. This took place on an island off of Japan. Scientists gave the monkeys sweet potatoes but covered them in sand. The monkeys, not surprisingly, liked the sweet potatoes but were not particularly fond of the sand. One young monkey had the ingenuity to figure out that she could wash the sand off potatoes and enjoy a dirt-free meal. She taught this to the other monkeys in her tribe and they, in turn, taught it to yet others.

Now - remember - they were isolated on an island. However once the one hundreth monkey learned this new skill monkeys on other islands spontaneously started demonstrating the same behavior.

Interpret this as you will...

 

[lavender]

 

[Starfish]

Uh...... I find that entire theory to be a total joke.

Why?

Because several species of Asian snow monkeys have dug root vegetables from the higher mountainous regions of Japan and the Coast of China and taken them down to the ocean, from the mountains, to wash in the salt water to add flavor.

They've been doing this FOR CENTURIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So? It just took a bit of the old instinct to kick in and Voila!

People are so impressionable when they don't know better.


Shrooms and what?

 

[Doulton]

I haven't heard of the monkeys before, but I have heard of a similar trial with humans. Apparently, people are taken aside and given some sort of puzzles. Crosswords, wordfinds, general knowledge quizzes etc. Then, they circulate the same puzzles through magazines and/or other media. Then they take another group of people and give them the same puzzles, making sure that none of them have actually specifically done the puzzles before. Supposedly those people will do better than the second group because they will have absorbed some of the knowlwdge through collective consciousness.
Sounds like arse to me Even if there is no more direct explanation, I think people's contact with the puzzles in the magazines would be a more plausible theory than collective consciousness. Even if they haven't had direct contact with the puzzles, maybe their families and friends did the puzzles and were reminded of certain facts which they then brought up in conversation with the people who were tested? Sounds a bit far fetched maybe, but mass ESP?

This reminds me of a couple of cool hypothetical situations that I have been told about that are to test and encourage debate over philosophical issues. But I think they're good enough to merit their own threads, so you'll have to go and find them Coming soon to a BB near you.

 

[Thomas Paine]

On a side note, we were able to converse about monkeys. Anyone here ever heard of the 100 Monkey Theory?

Damn, I thought the "100 monkey theory" was "give 100 monkeys each a typewriter and eventually they'll come up with Newsmax."

 

[rambling man]

Liberalism only goes so far on the political scale..at some point you move so far left you stop being a liberal and start being someone else...
Stalin was far left but he sure as hell wasn't a liberal

So I think you are still just as much a liberal as you thought you were

Unless you lived in the 1850s and 1860s when the conservatives argued for limits on industrial abuses of workers and the environment while liberals fought for unfettered growth

 

[miles]

Don't worry, Lavy

You're hardly conservative.

Liberals and libertarians are sexual animals. Conservatives are too uptight to enjoy sex. Besides, it might be illegal.

 

[rambling man]

Conservatives dont enjoy sex? Look at the size of Puritan and Catholic families historically....there's a lot of sex going on there

 

[miles]

Just being fa-see-shus Ramblin' Guy.

Puritans...enjoying sex? They probably just cut a hole in the sheets and fucked through that.

 

[shadowsource]

100 Monkeys

Give 100 monkeys typewriters and some meth and they'll write all of Steven Spielberg's scripts within a month. Give them PCs and they'll write all of Markov's posts.

 

[KillerMuffin]

That's okay lavykins. I'm not as conservative as I thought I was. Even though I'm for the second amendment, throwing cash at the military, and see big business as more a necessity than an evil, my fellow republicans almost kicked me out cause I think we should legalize drugs too. I can empathize.

 

[rambling man]

don't chalk it up to defesniveness miles, im more on the libertarian boat than conservative anyway

 

[Weevil]

don't chalk it up to defesniveness miles, im more on the libertarian boat than conservative anyway

Actually while I get what you're trying to say I would put forth that Libertarians, for the most part, are very conservative as a whole.

 

[rambling man]

i wouldn't disagree with you really in some ways. Libertarians, I think, have Jeffersonian leanings that most of the Democrats abandoned as a whole years ago. Where they part company with other conservatives is the Fundamentalist groups who want to legislate morality

 

[Weevil]

i wouldn't disagree with you really in some ways. Libertarians, I think, have Jeffersonian leanings that most of the Democrats abandoned as a whole years ago. Where they part company with other conservatives is the Fundamentalist groups who want to legislate morality

It comes down to how we define conservative. I've always favored the classical definition that really has very little in common with what we think of as "conservatives today". A true conservative would care not one iota about sexual practices between consenting adults and would have very little to say about people using drugs. By that definition the Libertarians are true conservatives as opposed to both of the major political parties who each would like to get up in ones face to a degree.