The True Story of the Killing of Oblama bin Llama (News from the Unincorporated Side of Town Book 2)

Looking at a pencil is not exactly a thrill-a-minute proposition, but what happens inside your body during this mundane event is a slick piece of biochemical engineering. The eye treats the shape and color of the object as input that is transmitted via the optic nerve to the occipital lobe at the back of the brain where it is then relayed to other parts of the brain and identified as a pencil. Though your neurobiology is involved, viewing the pencil likely does not stir up much activity in the limbic or emotional parts of your brain.

Looking at pencils, in other words, does not typically give people joy, melancholy, or a case of the hots. Loved ones, dangerous animals, beautiful landscapes, disgusting objects, cute babies, and threatening situations all tend to spur activity in neural channels not activated by viewing a pencil. In response to such stimuli, people report intense reactions and exhibit physiological changes. Brain imaging will show heightened activity in emotionally relevant parts of the brain, including the amygdala, insular cortex, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and anterior cingulate cortex; an endocrinological assay will show alterations in hormonal levels; heart rate and respiration will accelerate, pupils will dilate, and palms will get sweaty.

To put it more simply, the body changes in measurable ways. These physiological changes affect how an object is perceived, processed, and responded to — and the variation from person to person in the nature of these responses is substantial. Each of us is primed to respond physiologically and psychologically to certain categories of stimuli — just not to the same stimuli and not to the same degree.

Show a group of people the same stimulus and some will flatline while others will get a case of the vapors. People are not fully conscious of their predispositions. Even then, they were not taken seriously for a long time. Job applicant resumes reviewed on heavy clipboards are judged more worthy than identical resumes on lighter clipboards; holding a warm or hot drink can influence whether opinions of other people are positive or negative; when people reach out to pick up an orange while smelling strawberries they unwittingly spread their fingers less widely — as if they were picking up a strawberry rather than an orange.

People actively deny that a chunky clipboard has anything to do with their assessment of job applicants or that a funky odor has anything to do with their moral judgments. Judges certainly refuse to believe that the length of time since their last break has anything to do with their sentencing decisions; after all, they are meting out objective justice. Leibniz was right, though, and the baloney generator is full of it.

The way we respond — biologically, physiologically, and in many cases unwittingly — to our environments influences attitudes and behavior. People much prefer to believe, however, that their decisions and opinions are rational rather than rationalized. This desire to believe we are rational is certainly in effect when it comes to politics, where an unwillingness to acknowledge the role of extraneous forces of which we may not even be aware is especially strong. Many pretend that politics is a product of citizens taking their civic obligations seriously, sifting through political messages and information, and then carefully and deliberately considering the candidates and issue positions before making a consciously informed decision.

Compared to people not just judges with full stomachs, those who have not eaten for several hours are more sympathetic to the plight of welfare recipients- Americans whose polling place happens to be a church are more likely to vote for right-of-center candidates and ideas than those whose polling place is a public school. People think they know the reasons they vote for the candidates they do or espouse particular political positions or beliefs, but there is at least a slice of baloney in that thinking. Responses to political stimuli are animated by emotional and not always conscious bodily processes.

The fact that extraneous forces that may not have crossed the threshold of awareness sometimes called sub-threshold shape political orientations and actions makes it possible for individual variation in nonpolitical variables to affect politics. If hotter ambient temperatures in a room increase acceptance of global warming, maybe people whose internal thermostats incline them to feeling hot are also more likely to be accepting of global warming.

Likewise, sensitivity to clutter and disorder, to smell, to disgust, and to threats becomes potentially relevant to political views. Since elements of these sensitivities often are outside of conscious awareness, it becomes possible that political views are shaped by psychological and physiological patterns. It is important to recognize that predispositions are not fixed at birth. We cannot emphasize enough that we are not making a nature versus nurture argument.

Innate forces combine with early development and later powerful environmental events to create attitudinal and behavioral tendencies. These predispositions are physically grounded in the circuitry of the nervous system, so once instantiated they can be very difficult, but far from impossible, to change. Altering a predisposition is like turning a supertanker; it usually takes concerted force for an extended period of time, but it can be done.

Just like those heavy clipboards, a variety of predispositions nudge us in one direction or another, often without our knowledge, increasing the odds that we will behave in a certain way but leaving plenty of room for predispositions to be contravened and also for the predispositions themselves to be modified. Still, while it is possible for situations and events to alter predispositions, attitudes are notoriously resistant to change. This is true outside the realm of politics and definitely true within it. Several months after experiencing even major life events such as an amputation or winning the lottery it appears that most people have returned to a degree of happiness with their lives surprisingly similar to that present before the major event.

We believe the reason for this relative stability is the existence of an ingrained emotional and therefore physiological response to stimuli that ends up being relevant to politics. It takes quite a bit for such habituated emotional responses to be eliminated, let alone reversed.

Once they are there, they tend to be there for the long haul. For example, people may have a predisposed response to Barack Obama that would be evoked by a garden-variety image of him. Subsequent events and information, perhaps about his role in killing Osama Bin Laden, or a picture of him losing his composure, could alter that default response. A final critical and often misunderstood element of predispositions is that they are not equally present in all people. Just as the content of the predisposition varies from person to person, so too does the degree to which a predisposition is present at all.

Being politically predisposed is not a requirement for membership in the human race. Like most everything else, the presence of predispositions should be thought of as operating along a continuum. Certain people are in possession of powerful political predispositions and politically relevant stimuli set off easily measurable psychological, cognitive, and physiological responses.

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Perhaps the nature of the political predisposition points in a liberal direction, perhaps in a conservative direction, or perhaps in different directions depending upon the particular issue. Other people have much weaker political predispositions. For them, politics is mosdy irrelevant and they do not have much in the way of a preexisting, physiocognitive basis for their political behavior and attitudes.

These individuals are often puzzled by all the fuss about politics. The central thesis of this book is that many people have broad predispositions relevant to their behaviors and inclinations in the realm of politics. These predispositions can be measured with psychologically oriented survey items, with cognitive tests that do not rely on self-reports, with brain imaging, or with traditional physiological and endocrinological indicators.

Due to perceptual, psychological, processing, and physiological differences, liberals and conservatives, for all intents and purposes, perceive and thus experience different worlds. Given this, it is not surprising to find they approach politics as though they were somewhat distinct species. Folk wisdom has long put down political differences to something deep, perhaps even biological.

There have been numerous efforts to study whether political beliefs reflect deeper psychological tendencies such as personality traits we address this possibility in Chapter 4. These attempts have frequently been met with scorched earth criticism. This situation may finally be changing. After a lull, the last 10 years have seen a flowering of research on the broader forces intertwined with politics. This more recent research can be placed in one of two overarching categories.

In the first, politics is measured using survey questionnaires that probe characteristics like personal values, moral foundations, personality traits, psychological tendencies, and sensitivity to disgust. The predispositions people bring with them into political situations can be referred to as motivated social reasoning, hot cognition, habits, longstanding predispositions, or antecedent conditions.

Even readers primed to accept that the differences between liberals and conservatives extend well beyond the realm of politics may not appreciate the biological and cognitive depth of these differences. In short, for the first time real progress is being made in connecting political variations with biological and cognitive variations. This newer, biologically informed research is cumulating in a fashion that the more psychologically based efforts of the s, s, and s did not, but the critics of placing politics in broader context have not gone away. In fact, for several reasons, they appear more tenacious.

The incorporation of biology is particularly troubling to people who fail to realize that biology is not tantamount to determinism. Moreover, the popular press monitors academic findings in this area closely, opening channels to a broader array of critics. Online outlets and networks further widen opportunities to offer commentary, particularly on an incendiary topic such as the deeper differences between liberals and conservatives.

Whereas critics of the earlier iterations often were restricted to academic circles, that is hardly an apt description of the current situation. George Will assailed psychologist John Jost for his assertion that political orientations are undergirded by motivated social cognition. Though critics of the movement to place politics in biological and psychological context hail from academia, journalism, and the public at large, political scientists are especially dubious.

A longstanding assumption in political science, best exemplified in the influential work of Philip Converse, is that political beliefs and ideologies are narrow and apply only to politics. The fundamental idea is that to be in possession of a political ideology it is necessary to know the meaning of labels such as liberal and conservative and also to be in possession of a consistent set of political preferences that add up to a coherent match with those labels. As a result of this formulation, many scholars have convinced themselves that ideology is rare and getting rarer now that the big isms, such as Communism and Fascism, are history.

In sum, Groucho Marx, Gilbert and Sullivan, and folk wisdom notwithstanding, plenty of people find the possibility of deeper, biological bases of politics both unbelievable and off-putting. Our goal in this book is to show readers that deep, biological, politically relevant predispositions are quite real and anything but preposterous.

Even if such a group-sing came to pass, liberals probably would be holding their lighters aloft, swaying as they sang with undisciplined abandon, while conservatives would be sitting in orderly rows, perhaps pews, performing a clipped, somewhat cold, but extremely well-rehearsed rendition. The forced agreement on lyrics and melody would be superficial and misleading. Vidal would be in the back making up dirty lyrics and Buckley would be down front trying to maintain order and threatening to punch Vidal in the kisser.

The way to live with political differences is not to perpetuate the myth that they are a passing and remediable inconvenience but to recognize their depth and work effectively within the constraints they inevitably create. Rather than fanning the flames of ideological disagreement, the goal should be to ameliorate the problems disagreement creates. Understanding the reasons for gridlock and polarization will not cause these problems to disappear magically but will suggest realistic approaches to softening their edges and improving governance.

Such an acknowledgment would not entail giving up on efforts at political persuasion. Remember that the relationships we are about to describe are modest and probabilistic. Approval of the other side is not what we advocate but the political system will be a happier and more productive place if political adversaries are viewed not with scorn but with a perhaps grudging recognition that they experience a different world.

This means accepting that political orientations are connected to deep physio cognitive predispositions in a broadly predictable fashion. Acceptance of this belief requires rejecting two widely accepted assertions. The first is that all politics is culturally and historically idiosyncratic since one society might be concerned with famines and droughts, another with the super-power across the river, and yet another with protecting mineral riches.

If this assertion is true, it becomes pointless to try to generalize about political divisions, patterns, and viewpoints. If, from a behavioral point of view, human architecture is all the same, it follows that differences in political orientations cannot be more than skin deep and physio cognitive predispositions are irrelevant. Both assertions — one about the nature of politics and one about the nature of humans — are incorrect. In fact, they have it exacdy backwards: Though traditional wisdom asserts that politics varies and human nature is universal, in truth politics is universal and human nature varies.

Failing to appreciate these two points renders it impossible to grasp the true source of political conflict. Accordingly, before we present empirical evidence documenting the deep-seated psychological, cognitive, physiological, and genetic correlates of political variation Chapters 4 -7T we first need to make the case that politics is universal and human nature is variable Chapters 2 and 3, respectively.

Full text of "Predisposed Liberals, Conservatives, And The Biology Of Political Differences"

Notes 1 You can find a complete audio of the minute debate at http: Clips of the juiciest exchanges can be found on Youtube. Still, asking carefully vetted questions and adding them up is the basic gist of it. The Secret Lives of the Brain, The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Free Will and the Science of the Brain. Evaluating the U. Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment.

The Myth of a Polarized America. Chapter 2 Getting Into Bedrock with Politics If the Left-Right distinction did not exist, scholars of ideology would need to invent its equivalent. John Jost Politics is for the present Albert Einstein Former U.

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As long-time college professors, we are dubious. Still, this does not mean that conservative suspicions about faculty politics are without merit most academics are left-leaning or that there are no historical examples of campus ideological indoctrination. The City College of New York in the mid-twentieth century, for instance, came about as close as any institution of higher education will ever come to fulfilling right-wing nightmares of academia.

The faculty, already tainted with a hint of radical leftism, caused a scandal by trying to hire British polymath Bertrand Russell — who apart from being a genius was a well-known Socialist, pacifist, and general promoter of avant-garde social ideas he thought religion outdated and saw nothing morally objectionable about premarital sex. Astonishingly, the legal system obliged. State Supreme Court Justice John McGeehan ruled Russell morally unfit to teach, the upshot being that City College students dodged the bullet of taking instruction from a future Nobel laureate.

This was unfortunate for champions of conservative rectitude in higher education; the students, if anything, were more radical than the faculty. Communists controlled the school newspaper; Socialists sought the ouster of the Reserve Officer Training Corps; and campus left-wingers of various denominations issued manifestoes denouncing capitalism, cuts in education, oppression of the working class, imperialist wars and nonimperialist wars, imperialists in general and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in particular, who apparently was considered by a surprising fraction of the student body to be an imperialist, right-wing, war-mongering oppressor of the working classes who was not doing nearly enough for education.

At the time, anti-Semitism led to Jewish quotas at many American universities but not at liberal-minded City. As a result of the prejudices elsewhere in higher education, City College ended up with an astonishing concentration of intellectual talent, including nine Nobel Prize winners who graduated between and At the periphery of the lunchroom were alcoves consisting of benches facing low refectory tables in rectangular or semicircular spaces.

There were a dozen or so of these alcoves and each was the turf of a particular political, ethnic, or religious group; for example, there was a Zionist alcove, a Catholic alcove, and an alcove for the smattering of African American students. These were mosdy hardcore supporters of the type of Communism practiced by the Soviet Union. These leftists, though, did not impose the same sort of ideological purity test required for admission into Alcove No. They included a group of a dozen Trotskyists, a roughly equal number of Socialists, a few followers of other miscellaneous isms, and a handful of right-wingers, which in this group meant they voted for Roosevelt and called themselves Social Democrats.

Radical left-wing politics and ideology was constantly discussed and debated in Alcoves No. Julius Rosenberg, Communist boogeyman number one of the McCarthy era, was executed in for passing on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Before trying to advance the vanguard of the proletariat by giving Commies the bomb, Rosenberg had graduated from City College with a degree in electrical engineering.

More principled and moderate leftists who were City College alums included people like Irving Howe, who went on to help found the quarterly magazine Dissent as well as the Democratic Socialists of America. That is not to say a movement failed to materialize from the radicalized, left-wing atmosphere of City College. A powerful and influential political movement was birthed, not in Alcove No. As such, its alumni and heirs influenced the politics of a generation, reshaped the policy orientations of a major American political party, and played an outsized role in promoting the interventionist foreign policies promulgated by the U.

You see, a key player in Alcove No. At least two lessons seem to flow from the political legacy of the radicals of Alcove No. First, institutions of higher education cannot indoctrinate leftist political beliefs for toffee, even at a radicalized, left-leaning place like mid-twentieth-century City College. And regardless of whether they kept to the left like Howe or drifted rightward like Kristol, their navigation of the political spectrum was not put on automatic pilot by their experience as undergraduates.

The second lesson seems even clearer: Politics and political beliefs are fungible. They change depending on time and place. The Stalinist-Trotskyist split did not just demark who was welcome into Alcove No. Well, not so much. It is difficult to find a true dyed-in-the-wool Marxist or Trotskyist evangelizing ideology on an American college campus these days. Those who do exist represent amusing or irritating relics of the past rather than existential threats to the republic.

Many giants of neoconservatism started out as liberals who supported the Democratic Party. They ended up as conservatives in the high echelons of the Republican Party. We generally accept the first lesson: Colleges and universities stink at ideological indoctrination. There are enough counter-examples to keep an ember of righteous indignation glowing in certain circles, but you have to look pretty hard to find anyone doing this sort of thing with even moderate levels of success. Those who are any good at it are as likely to be on the right as the left; the academic neocons, for example, turned out to be a pretty persuasive bunch.

We take issue, however, with the second lesson and contend that politics at its core is more or less invariable. As laid out at the end of the previous chapter, we are staking a claim that human nature is varied and politics is constant. Yet, how can politics be viewed as stable if the radical left can morph into the radical ish right, if the issues innervating students in the s were not the issues innervating students in the s or in s? Gay marriage and global warming, for example, did not trip many triggers in the s. Abortion is an issue that polarizes politics in the United States but makes hardly a ripple in the United Kingdom.

Tribal loyalties structure political orientations in some African nations but not n Denmark. In this chapter we make the case that, despite the apparent idiosyncrasies of politics in the alcoves of City College and beyond, clear political commonalities are present everywhere and at all times if you look for them and are not philosophically opposed to finding them. These commonalities reside in what we refer to as the bedrock dilemmas of politics, and in order to understand these bedrock dilemmas it is helpful to go back in time a few thousand years.

I Am in Love with Your Political Orientation If you can believe Diogenes Laertius, that gossipy ancient biographer of even more ancient philosophers, Aristode was an odd-looking fellow with some even odder habits. He had thin legs, a lisp and small eyes. He was a flashy dresser, collected dishes, and was rumored to like taking baths in warm oil. Political scientists are quick to claim dead white guys in togas as disciplinary forebears, and rather than give Aristotle his due as the first biologist, we like to view him as one of our own in part because of a famous line from early in Politics: Though widely quoted as evidence that politics constitute a natural human activity, Aristotle actually took some pains to point out that a polis itself was not a wholly natural form of social organization.

Aristotle believed that the polis — or what we would call a polity — was something new and different that developed from earlier forms of social organization — families, bands, and tribes of Yooks and Zooks. It was meta-social group, an association of associations. There is something fundamental about politics, and it is deeply embedded in our nature.

On this point we do not have to take the word of a spindly legged ancient soaking in a tub of olive oil. An increasing number of studies suggest that political beliefs and behaviors are so deeply embedded that they may be genetically influenced, and we devote an entire chapter to this research later on. Yet it is not just that political attitudes appear to be influenced by genes many traits are ; it is that genetics appear to exert more influence on political attitudes than other social attitudes.

GWAS studies have started to examine a variety of social attitudes, and one of the more interesting findings is that genes seem to explain more about political preferences than, say, economic preferences. Still, as we will explain in-depth later on, it appears that genes do predispose people toward certain political orientations, perhaps more than they do orientations in other areas. More evidence of the centrality of politics comes from its influence on mate selection.

Perhaps you think you married your wife because opposites attract or that you moved in with your boyfriend solely because of his winning personality. Social scientists of various stripes have spent a good deal of time examining who tends to form mate pairs with whom in order to obey a biological imperative to have kids, get a mortgage, and buy a minivan.

What is crystal clear from this research is that people do not generally pair off with those who are similar to them in terms of personality traits — good news for us scholarly introverts. Some matching occurs on the basis of shared physical traits height, weight, attractiveness but even here the correlations are weak. If not personality and physicality, on what variables are mate pairs the most likely to be matches? Education level is fourth.

What an interesting if explosive combination! Extroverts are as likely to marry introverts as they are to marry other extroverts but, James Carville and Mary Matalin aside, liberals are much more likely to marry other liberals than conservatives. Spouses tend to have similar political attitudes. But are mate pairs initially attracted to each other in part because of politics and values what scholars call political assortative mating , or might there be other explanations for the fact that mates tend to be cut from the same political cloth?

Two possible alternative explanations come to mind. As plausible as they are, these alternative explanations for the political similarity of mates do not withstand analysis. A comparison of the political similarity of couples married a short time and those married a long time indicates virtually no increased political similarity for longer marriages. One of the few data sets that make it possible to track couples over time comes to the same conclusion.

In fact, on some issues, like gender roles, disagreement within mate pairs tended to become greater with the passage of the years we bet that pattern makes for some interesting dinner table conversations. In sum, the high degree of political similarity is present from the very beginning of relationships. What this means is that even if the analysis is restricted to narrow groups, mate pairs tend to be politically similar.

For example, couples consisting of middle-class, college- educated, Midwestern Roman Catholics in their thirties tend to be much more politically similar than would be expected given the substantial political variation among individuals in that particular sociodemographic group. While the deep and fundamental nature of politics brings us together, it also splits us apart.

Political beliefs lead to astonishing acts of collective action for the sole purpose of punishing people with different political beliefs. We humans are really big on trying to exterminate, or at least seriously annoy, another group because its members have different ideas about politics. Now, it is one thing to have someone steal your ass and then go looking to go kick his; it is quite another to kill complete strangers just because they have a tea towel flapping on a stick that is a different color than the tea towel flapping on your stick.

Endow the tea towels with symbolic political importance, though, and plenty of us seem to be willing to do pretty much exacdy that. Politics does not divide us only on the mass-scale, but also on a much more personal level. Politics and its running mate, religion, tend to get people worked up to about the same pitch — which, to say the least, is high.

This is why politics and not the pros and cons of extroversion is a taboo subject at many social gatherings. We can get sideways with people we love over things that may not have any meaningful relevance to either of our lives. Politics is deep and fundamental to humans; it defines us as a species and is likely, quite literally, in our DNA.

Accepting that we are political animals, though, does not necessarily mean that politics is universal and stable across time and space. As Aristotle pointed out, a polis is not a natural form of social organization. It is a cultural construct, and while all polities are political, the particular issues and ideologies that animate alliances and divide families often seem to have little in common. The political beliefs that separated Athens from Sparta, Alcove No. What could possibly connect these different political beliefs over the eons and around the globe?

Answering this question requires appreciating the differences between labels and issues of the day on the one hand and bedrock principles on the other. Issues include how much and whom to tax; the legality of abortion; social welfare; environmental regulation; and whether to go to war, to the moon, or to the International Monetary Fund with hat in hand. A complex mass-scale society can produce a virtually limitless supply of issues. Labels are simply the vocabulary employed to describe the reasonably systematic orientations toward issues that float around a polity at a given time.

Labels can refer to actual organizations such as political parties, or to less tangible entities such as ideologies particular sets of beliefs about government and society. To the casual observer — indeed, to most professional observers — issues and labels constitute pretty much the entire content of politics. Issues are what people argue and disagree about at a given time and place, and labels distinguish the groups contesting those issues or the broad philosophical bases of those issue positions. If you think of politics in terms of issues and labels, it is difficult to see anything that looks universal and stable about it because issues and labels change across time and from country to country.

True, issues can dominate politics in a particular place for an extended period of time. Eventually, though, even this issue faded — and more typical issues do not have this kind of staying power. In fact, in these days of the hour news cycle issues can rise and fall between breakfast and lunch. Anyone remember what big bruising fiscal issue separated candidates A1 Gore and George W. Bush in the U. The labels that organize issue disagreements likewise seem to be historically, culturally, or geographically idiosyncratic.

The origin of the left-right political divide is mostly the product of seating arrangements of the Estates-General in Revolutionary France. If the toffs were seated in the galleries, maybe we would have an up-down divide rather than a left-right which might be fun — imagine the signs at City College protests: It is because issues and labels are so variable across time and space that many political scientists are skeptical about the whole idea of ideology, especially the notion that systematic sets of political beliefs can be neatly ordered along a dimension with moderates in the middle between two extremes of left and right.

Traditionally speaking, the political left has been associated with support for equality and tolerance of departures from tradition, while the right is more supportive of authority, hierarchy, and order. Communists can be a pretty authoritarian bunch, though they are traditionally placed on the left, and conservatives are often fierce defenders of individual liberties even though they are viewed as residing on the right. Some people seem to simultaneously hold beliefs associated with the left and the right.

Libertarians, for example, tend to be left leaning on many social issues gay marriage, abortion , but right leaning on economic issues government regulations, taxes. Political scientists who study issue attitudes have frequently come to the conclusion that political beliefs are multidimensional and that where you are sitting on any particular issue at any particular time is determined wholly by social and cultural forces. In short, much research argues that people are simply not very ideological; that their political beliefs do not systematically add up to a stable and meaningfully interpretable point on a left-right dimension.

Only a few people, this argument goes, wander the world with some underlying stable philosophy of government that charts where we sit in the grand hall of political beliefs and attitudes. Rather than stable philosophical or psychological gyroscopes, individual political beliefs and attitudes are seen as more a mash-up of purely social and environmental influences ranging from family, friends, schooling, and peers to whether you recently received a pink slip, find the president attractive, served in the military, or just woke up feeling patriotic this morning.

We might be political animals, but people seem to acquire unique outlooks depending upon their particular cultures and historical niches. Political Universals So, to sum up the story so far, on the one hand beliefs and issues are all over the place and only really hang together in any sensible sort of fashion if you trap them in a particular place at a particular time. On the other hand, at least since Aristode, it has been recognized that humans are political by nature. Even though they live in unnatural agglomerations called polities, they universally take to the social relations of these associations of associations.

Like bees and ants, we seem to be designed for social living, but unlike bees and ants we are not just social but political in the sense that politics is contentious and emotionally charged, and promotes conflict as well as cooperation. Politics is such a fundamental part of our natures that political temperaments are at least partially heritable and mates are selected on the basis of politics thus further shaping the political temperaments of offspring.

Heritable political beliefs make no sense if politics is purely the product of our social environments. The key to understanding this apparent contradiction is what we call bedrock social dilemmas. These reflect divisions in the underlying first principles of politics: All social units face the same need to resolve certain social dilemmas. They need to decide on leadership and decision-making arrangements, distribution of resources, and how best to secure protection from out-groups, as well as punish the misbehavior of in-group members and orient to traditional as opposed to new forms of social behavior.

People clearly have different underlying preferences regarding these bedrock dilemmas. Some prefer more hierarchical decision-making while others prefer egalitarian arrangements; some believe in share and share alike while others believe in taking care of your own; some see out-groups as threats while others see them as potential sources of friendship and new knowledge.

These underlying bedrock dilemmas of politics are fundamental to human social life; they are never fully resolved, and disputes over the best solutions to these dilemmas constandy churn human societies. Small hunter -gatherer societies needed to figure out the appropriate way to share the spoils of the hunt; large, developed modern societies need to setde on the niceties of tax codes and social welfare structures.

Small hunter -gatherer societies needed to figure out the best way to treat one of their own who committed a serious violation of an established social norm: Banishment from the group? Leave it up to the victim of the offense? Large developed modern societies need to settie on the finer points of the criminal code: The issues sometimes appear quite different, but the bedrock principles are exactly the same.

Labels and issues are just waves on the surface; they can be whipped up and blown every which way by the winds of history and culture. What they are all created from, though, is the same basic set of underlying currents. These dilemmas have been tacidy recognized as the basis of politics in mass- scale societies for at least two thousand years. In Politics, Aristode tackles a wide-ranging set of preferences for the structure and organization of the polity; he specifically undertakes an analysis not just of Athenian but of Spartan, Cretan, and Carthaginian approaches to running a polity and notes big differences in preferences for the structure and organization of mass-scale social life.

Athens was run through a direct democracy where citizens, or at least well-off men, voted direcdy on issues. Sparta was more authoritarian, with hereditary monarchs and an elected-for-life council. Differences also appeared in resource distribution, social structure, and expected and enforced social behavior, as well as in differing sets of institutions. Viewed from the perspective of bedrock political dilemma, Sparta is to conservative as Athens is to liberal. Over two thousand years later, these same underlying issues animated the discussions in Alcoves No. How should our mass-scale society make decisions?

What rules should everyone follow? What should we do with people who do not follow the rules? Do we try new things or stick with tradition? This is what we mean by the universality of politics. Regardless of the issues and labels, the same set of dilemmas lurks underneath. When we talk about predispositions in this book, we are referring to standing orientations that have a measurable biological though not necessarily innate signature — in other words, to political predispositions that are biologically instantiated. The labels for particular political predispositions might be different in different places at different times, and they might be applied to wildly varying sets of issues, but that does not mean they are not reflecting a standard set of positions on bedrock dilemmas.

We might call people conservatives and liberals in one place and kumquats and rutabagas in another — or even the same person a Democrat in one era and a Republican in another — but in all societies there are those who favor sticking with traditional values and those who favor more experimental social arrangements, those who want strong leaders and those who want a more egalitarian approach, those who advocate engagement with out-groups and those who see out-groups as threats to be avoided or conquered, those who call for resource redistribution and those who do not.

To get an idea of how a set of predispositions toward these bedrock dilemmas can provide a constant anchor underneath shifting issues and labels, consider contemporary attitudes toward military intervention, an issue much fought over by the left and right in the United States. Generally speaking, it has been the right — Republicans — that has been more supportive of this sort of thing, while the long hairs on the left are more opposed. Military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, and Grenada was launched by Republican presidential administrations, and a big chunk of the public support for those operations was provided by rank-and-file Republicans.

Vietnam was fought primarily under Democratic administrations, but the war was strongly supported by many Republicans. Republicans similarly supported Korean operations when Democrat Harry Truman was president, and often bashed him for not doing more — in particular for his refusal to drop nukes on China, as suggested by that sensible General MacArthur. What is interesting is that the aggressive and interventionist streak of the Republican Party in the last half of the twentieth century is in fairly strong contrast with Republican positions during the first half of that century.

Back in the late s, powerful Republicans — with plenty of support from the rank and file — were among the strongest voices arguing for an isolationist stand to keep the United States out of a spreading European conflict. One of the biggest organizations pushing the isolationist message was the American First Committee AFC , which had international aviation icon Charles Lindbergh as its most prominent and visible spokesman.

America, on the other hand, should sit this one out. At its height, the AFC attracted nearly a million members. This isolationist stance was not surprising — Republicans had taken this as the party line for decades. Two decades on, many Republicans were singing the same isolationist tune. Fortress America isolationists becoming Cold Warrior interventionists — where is the unifying thread in that? These patterns only make sense if viewed from the perspective of bedrock dilemmas such as the appropriate relationship with out-groups.

The issues of the day — whether to help take on the Nazis, saber-rattle at the Russkies, or pursue Saddam Hussein into his rabbit hole — are shaped by all sorts of framing and partisan effects, contextual factors like who is in power Democrat FDR or Republican George W. While that orientation resolves the dilemma — people who are not us are potential threats — it does not resolve the issue of how to deal with those potential threats in a way that maximizes protection of the in-group.

This was just the strategy embraced by Lindbergh and many on the right — but then on December 7, , the Japanese Air Force demonstrated that minding our own business did not always keep the out-groups out. How to deal with these threats, then? The answer, in one form or another, was: Get them before they get us. Conservatives will only support nation-building when it is framed as something that can keep the United States safe by stabilizing a previously dangerous foreign entity. For their part, liberals will find nation-building appealing when it is framed as invoking national self-determination, the welfare of the people of that foreign entity, and integration with the international community.

Here is another example of framing affecting the issues of the day, but doing so against the backdrop of a stable bedrock issue. Exit polls from the election in the United States indicated that Latinos voted Democratic by better than a 2 to 1 margin. In early , key leaders of the Republican Party, still stinging from their unpopularity with this quickly growing demographic, proposed a path to citizenship for a portion of the estimated 11 million individuals currendy in the country illegally.

Electoral incentives can be strong, however, and many Republicans are beginning to view those 11 million as long as they have no criminal record, have paid all their taxes, have been here a long time, know U. Still, the softening of position indicates that definitions of the in-group and out-groups can be reframed in some circumstances.

Does this mean that, compared to liberals, conservatives on average are less suspicious of out-groups? Not in the slightest. Understanding the unity of politics thus requires diving beneath the issue stances of the day and the vocabulary employed so that it is possible to identify the different sides on those issues.

It is at this deeper level that we find a set of predispositions toward social life that are as constant as the force of opposite magnetic poles, pushing people together or pulling them apart regardless of what issues or labels are in play. From this perspective, in order for a universal element of politics to exist, labels do not need to be constant across time and space and neither do issues of the day.

Conservatives may have advocated different strategies before and after World War II, but their wariness of out-groups and their aversion to being pushed around by and potentially made subservient to out-groups has never wavered. Disputes over bedrock political principles occur always and everywhere since people in all societies differ in their inherent predispositions toward, for example, the nature of leadership or the necessity of adhering to traditional values. What we call these people is beside the point — the point being that differences regarding bedrock dilemmas have existed as long as human beings have been living in social groups.

Small groups — the families, tribes, and bands in which we lived for much of human history — were so intimate and personal that collective decision-making could be sorted out through relatively simple institutions like kin group dominance hierarchies. This sort of social intimacy, though, does not describe politics on the mass-scale. The population of Athens numbered somewhere in the low tens of thousands, and they managed to keep politics reasonably intimate and social only by defining citizenship so narrowly that it effectively cut most people, including Aristotle as it happened, out of collective decision-making.

The tangible and personal gave way to the abstract and impersonal. Now we are talking about conservatives in Kansas who are trying to get a federal government in Washington, D. We are talking about liberals who want those same conservatives in Kansas to cough up tax payments so the same federal government in Washington, D. On that scale we are making the leap from the merely social to the truly political.

Our preferences regarding bedrock dilemmas — adherence to traditional values and redistribution of resources — are now splitting us into identifying with big abstract ideas like conservatism or liberalism or whatever ism is popular in your particular culture. Time to pick an alcove and design a tea towel. Society Works Best When If our argument for the universality of politics is correct, we should, at least in theory, be able to measure preferences on bedrock dilemmas and these preferences should line up with political attitudes and beliefs in any given historical or cultural context.

Historically speaking, we can certainly dig up some anecdotal evidence to support our argument. Aristotle was kind enough to provide some of this sort of thing, pointing out that city states like Sparta and Athens differed crucially in their preferences for leadership styles and collective decision-making, resulting in differing institutions a monarchy, the assembly , that in turn perpetuated advocacy for those preferences.

Such differences did not just show up between ancient polities, but also within them. The late Roman Republic circa the century before the birth of Christ was marked by an ideological divide over bedrock dilemmas. The sides were not called conservatives or liberals, but optimates and populares. Teddy Kennedy would have looked good in a populare toga. For all intents and purposes, we probably could call optimates conservatives and populares liberals. The underlying tectonic plates may go by different names, but the fault lines between them are uncannily similar. Along with a number of other researchers, we have been arguing in academic journals for several years that individuals have core preferences on fundamental issues such as leadership, defense, punishment of norm violators, devotion to traditional behavioral standards, and distribution of resources.

It is one thing to make a theoretical argument, though, and quite another to provide evidence for it. If the argument is correct, quite independent of labels it should be possible to get a notion of whether someone prefers a society to be run with an assertive leadership style or a society that upholds traditional, unchanging norms of conduct. We should, in other words, be able to tap direcdy into the universality of politics. One political scientist, J. Laponce, conducted a large multinational analysis that included representative countries from Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, and found that politics falls pretty predictably into a more or less universal left-right spectrum.

Most humans are right handed and lefties were viewed with suspicion for a very long time. As a result, the left-right opposites metaphor was readily available as an organizing device for social relations. For millennia and in most cultures, the right has been associated with religious and social orthodoxy, the just, and the good, while the left has been associated with the opposite. There is a reason we seek to be righteous and not lefteous.

The big exceptions to the left- right social metaphor are the rare societies dominated by left-handed people where the left is associated with religious and social rectitude and certain other societies like the Chinese who have used more of an up-down duality, with the celestial guardians of social orthodoxy at the top. Even here, though, it is the directional labels that are different and not the bedrock of politics. The basic idea was to try to come up with a reasonably comprehensive list of bedrock social dilemmas that should make sense regardless of historical or cultural context.

We used these questions to create a simple scale of preferences on social organization. The first time we employed this scale in on a sample of U. Just as a reminder — we are in a discipline where correlations half that size are reasons to click your heels, gloat at conferences, and dream of Nobel nomination committees. Or at least ask for a raise. Authority and Leadership Society works best when. Conservative positions on bedrock principles predict conservative positions on issues of the day, liberal bedrock principles predict liberal issue stances, and moderate positions on bedrock principles predict moderate issue stances.

Though much more work needs to be done in a broader array of country contexts, the various versions of this index appear to be fairly predictive not only of issue attitudes but of partisanship and self-reported ideology. Many people — with some justification — find the notion that there might be genes, particular quirks of neural architecture, or physiological functions that increase the probability of an individual favoring the Bush-era tax cuts or opposing a shift from direct farm subsidies to cut-rate crop insurance to be a bit far-fetched — and so do we. The notion that specific issue attitudes might be biologically instantiated can seem downright silly since issues clearly are tied to culture and the vagaries of historical circumstance.

We hope to have explained how ephemeral issues of the day rest on the foundations of universal bedrock social dilemmas. Indeed, we think the behaviors and attitudes driven by preferences with regard to bedrock social dilemmas are likely as primitive and nearly as powerful as other motivators of social attitudes and behaviors widely recognized as being influenced by our biology — things like the need for reproduction and sustenance.

All known human societies have used these sorts of classifications and even the most primitive cultures have structured their social relations by thinking in terms of opposites. The division is real and it is unavoidable, and it centers on distinct orientations to mass-scale social life that are typically called ideologies.

It could no more be restricted to societal elites than could interpersonal communication. Context-specific issues and labels often consume attention and energies to the point that we are blinded to the underlying bedrock principles involved. Debates about capital punishment are context specific; debates about the appropriate treatment of in-group members who have violated social norms are as enduring as bedrock. Having established that the nature of politics, despite the protestations of many, is universal, our task now shifts to the nature of the human condition.

We assert that there is no singular human nature but that individual humans have distinct natures or predispositions. Important variations from person to person exist and are responsible for the dangerously volatile nature of politics. These variations are the subject of the next chapter. Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature in See especially the portrait of Irving Howe, Aristotle seems to have used the phrase to express at least three distinct ideas. In his last speech, given just a few months before he died, he argued against sending American troops to China or Indo-China.

There have also been high-profile Republicans who have continued to champion the isolationist line — Pat Buchanan, for example. But remember, we are talking about tendencies and probabilities; not every Republican supports every military intervention. The Topography of Political Perceptions. Even so, the social principles index was still statistically and significantly correlated with a broad index of issue attitudes. That attitude index included some very different issues from those we asked about in U. Elis ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

Truman Capote Stanley Milgram is famous for teaching us that getting people to do really, really bad things to other people does not require an evil demagogue with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. All you need is five dollars and a lab coat. Does a mystery sound from the bottom of the sea indicate that Cthulhu may awake? List of unexplained sounds.

Mumbai "sweet" seawater incident. Red rain in Kerala. The crew of Apollo 17 snapped Earth with Antarctica on top. NASA followed Ptolemy and rotated it "back". An unlucky park ranger who was hit by lightning on seven separate occasions. He survived them all, but came to his own tragic end. A recently discovered mineral that forms from bird feces.

A commonly used chemical that can be deadly to all forms of plant and animal life, contributing to global warming , erosion , acid rain , torture and countless other maladies. List of chemical compounds with unusual names. Some a consequence of their constituents or origins, others simply the work of whimsical chemists. A day in celebration of Avogadro's number , 6. A term used to describe any material with properties that are unlikely or impossible for any real material to possess. Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster. A small statuette which is the only sculpture on the moon.

List of hypothetical Solar System objects. The planets that could have been. You think Pluto had it rough? At least it got its fifteen minutes of astronomical fame. The Moon is made of green cheese. Moon landing conspiracy theories. Fake photos, slow-motion cameras and secret studios.

All directed by Stanley Kubrick. Did the Luftwaffe, in fact, explore the final frontier and make contact with alien races? Whether the secret Nazi base is on the Moon or in Antarctica, the truth is apparently out there. And when you've exhausted the list , here's something new to try! The first fallen meteorite in recorded history to have verifiably injured a human.

An unusual neurological disorder, also known as " Dr. Strangelove syndrome", whereby one of the sufferer's hands seems to take on a life of its own. Taking a close look at a toilet bowl for the sake of science. The scale was inspired by eye charts. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators. The notion that food dropped on the floor is safe to eat only as long as it's picked up within five seconds. Also known as "Human Werewolf Syndrome ". Hypoalgesic effect of swearing.

As Redd Foxx once observed, "if you've never said 'shit', come back with me after the show and I'll slam my car door on your hand'". And you will feel better. Maple syrup urine disease. A condition frequently reported in medical students who perceive themselves to be experiencing the symptoms of the diseases they are studying. A disease, most envied by poker players, that makes facial expressions impossible. Schmidt sting pain index.

An entomologist is stung by just about everything known to sting and, en route, describes the pain involved in terms of a four-point comparative scale. A form of surgery where a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull. It was thought that such a procedure could cure problems like epilepsy or allow a person to enter into a higher state of consciousness. Allegedly a sex move involving punching one's partner in the back of the head during intercourse. Hamster zona-free ovum test. There is a day dedicated to protect the right to masturbate!

A medical condition where one of two conjoined twins lacks essential organs and must rely on the other for survival, often leeching its blood. An especially rare variant of this, fetus in fetu , involves one partially formed fetus developing within the body of the other. A colloquial term referring to a type of mass hysteria or panic where males grow fearful of removal or shrinking of the penis. Persistent genital arousal disorder. A condition found in remote regions of India in which people believe they have conceived a puppy shortly after being bitten by a dog.

A form of parasomnia similar to sleepwalking that causes people to engage in sexual acts while they are asleep. A Frenchwoman with the longest verified human lifespan in recorded history. She was at the time of her death. Abigail and Brittany Hensel. Conjoined twins with separate heads but joined bodies. An American trainee doctor who went to unusual lengths in his quest to prove that yellow fever is not contagious. A 19th-century construction worker who survived a three-foot-long 0.

His resultant behavioral changes have made him an important figure in the development of neuroscience. A 19th-century Scottish surgeon who, among other things, performed what has been described as "The only operation in history with a percent mortality". A Peruvian girl who gave birth to a son when she was five years old, becoming the youngest human mother on record. Unknown forces cause large groups of people to dance hysterically until dropping from exhaustion in multiple incidents in Europe from the 13th to 17th centuries. A real parasomnia that has been successfully used as a defence in court.

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine. A behavioral disorder with some very odd symptoms, including "hypersexuality" and a desire to examine objects with the mouth. Named after two doctors who gave psychotropic drugs to lobotomized monkeys. A Japanese expression referring to an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores. When a late-night radio host claims to have been brainwashed by the CIA, you may want to think twice.

Particularly common among Japanese tourists. Not to be confused with Jerusalem Syndrome or Stockholm Syndrome. A psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art or natural beauty. The Truman Show delusion. Those afflicted feel they are being watched all the time by a television audience, like Jim Carrey in the movie The Truman Show.

Depopulation of cockroaches in the ex-USSR countries. A deceptive beetle larva that entices its own predators by feigning prey-like movements in order to eat its predator. An as-yet unexplained phenomenon observed in April in Germany and Denmark. Suggested as a possible weapons delivery system. No, the fish are not trippin'; they will cause hallucinations if ingested. It is not known if hallucinations will occur if one fish consumes another. List of animals displaying homosexual behavior. List of animals with fraudulent diplomas. A species of mosquito that lives in underground railways.

Droppings of a nightingale variety used in facials. Some claim that it helps with acne. A species of isopod that has some males that mimic females and others that mimic juveniles, allowing them to mate without the alpha males realising what is going on behind their backs. Telepathic communication is not possible in snails no matter how far apart they may be.

Nothing else has been ruled out. A literal figurative variety of cockfighting between some species of flatworm. And the partridges better hide because the dogs think they are yummy. Did you know that prostitution exists among animals? Stray animals at Indian airports. Having an extra body part, be it as simple as an eleventh finger or as extreme as a second head!

A feature of Stegosaurus anatomy named after a Far Side comic strip. A parasitic crustacean that, when female they are hermaphroditic , attaches to and then destroys a fish's tongue, hooks itself to the remaining stub and becomes the fish's new tongue. A form of mating in invertebrates in which the male stabs the female in the abdomen with his penis, and injects his sperm through the wound. The practice of growing small jar-shaped kittens caused controversy years after it was revealed to be a hoax.

A cat famed for traveling on a bus around Plymouth , England. Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Dusty the Klepto Kitty. One of the national treasures of Turkey. He eventually returned to the UK and spent the rest of his life at the 'Home for Sailors'. A hospice cat who was featured in the New England Journal of Medicine for his purported ability to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients. A cat that was appointed Mayor of Talkeetna , Alaska.

The official station master of Kishi railway station in Japan. A plastic-coated magnet fed to cows to prevent gut damage by ingested bits of metal, aka hardware disease. Chicken and duck blood soup. Chicken Dance , Chicken dance. Valuable for the mitigation of damage from bird strikes. The chicken carcass must be thawed first, though.

A colony of feral chickens that have been living underneath a highway off-ramp since Mike the Headless Chicken. Squirrel induced power outages in Pennsylvania. Did you know that insurance companies have a medical code for this? Co-pays vary by insurance plan. Queen Victoria 's officially appointed rat-catcher and mole destroyer. A pig bred to look like the flag of Denmark , to circumvent prohibition of the flag.

It is said to enhance sexual potency in men and was banned by the Chinese government from the Olympics. The next time a whale washes on shore in one Oregon county, the authorities will leave the dynamite at home. Blobs of organic matter found washed up on beaches, which are frequently as mysterious as they are disgusting. Implanted electrodes let researchers "steer the animal over an obstacle course, making it twist, turn and even jump on demand".

Monkey selfie copyright dispute. Is a selfie taken by the critically-endangered Celebes crested macaque eligible for copyright? The Wikipedia article in question focuses on the copyright claim and is the subject of a lawsuit by the owner of the camera on which the images were taken. Pornographic movies created to achieve sexual arousal for Giant pandas , which have been proven to be unaffected by the popular drug Viagra.

Street dogs in Moscow. The dog ate my homework. Dubbed the "world's loneliest whale", it vocalizes at a frequency used by no known whale species. Possibly the oldest creature of modern times, this year-old tortoise was the former pet of Robert Clive of the British East India Company. A chimpanzee who used human toilet facilities, moonwalked , and allegedly attempted suicide.

Two stray dogs that roamed the streets of San Francisco, California in the early s and were exempted from local ordinances. Domino Day sparrow. Enumclaw horse sex case. A Humboldt penguin who gained worldwide fame after apparently falling in love with a cutout of an anime character. The various incarnations of Yale University 's athletic mascot. Hoover the talking seal. A Baboon who took over for his paraplegic owner as an employee of the Cape government railway.

A grotesque-looking sea monster made from the corpse of a ray. A left-coiled snail who became famous after a campaign to find another left-coiled snail so he could mate. He made the reverse of the 5p of Saint Helena. What have you done? A black dog whose portrayal in The Dam Busters somehow had to be edited out, overdubbed, or renamed. Nigger's grave remains unredacted , though. A chimpanzee , subject of long-running studies into animal language acquisition , named punningly for linguist Noam Chomsky.

Osama bin Laden elephant. An elusive elephant who terrorized the jungle of Assam. He was eventually shot, but there are those who question the official story of his death. Much like his famous namesake. Hippo and tortoise that befriended each other after the Indian Ocean Tsunami. A now-deceased psychic octopus who could predict the winner of football games, notably during the FIFA World Cup.

Ravens of the Tower of London. Ravens used as soldiers in the Tower of London. In , a Northern Bottlenose swam into London and on to the front pages of the British newspapers. A 13th-century French dog unofficially venerated as a saint until the s. In , two pigs escaped from an abattoir in Wiltshire and made news, both in the United Kingdom and worldwide.

Their story was turned into a TV movie in A tortoise that was present during the bombardment of Sevastopol during the Crimean War in and survived until A pig who survived the sinking of one warship, to become the mascot on one of the ships that had sunk his first home. Tragically he was then auctioned off and eaten.

An elephant that was electrocuted, as the event was filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company. He enjoyed beer and cigarettes. Rare blind beetle named after Adolf Hitler , poached by collectors of Hitler memorabilia. A trapdoor spider named after Stephen Colbert. Naturally, because he asked for it. Bill Gates' flower fly. A flower fly , Eristalis gatesi , named after Bill Gates. A new species of monkey that was officially named after the GoldenPalace. A genus of crab named in part after the titular character of the Harry Potter franchise.

The sole species of this genus is named after the coldly hostile, yet emotion-concealing character from the same franchise. An extracellular matrix -like retinal protein named after Pikachu. A European moth with wing markings bearing a chance resemblance to a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. A protein in the vertebrate hedgehog family that was officially named after Sega 's video game character Sonic the Hedgehog.

A type of mushroom named after SpongeBob SquarePants. A biting louse named for cartoonist Gary Larson of Far Side fame. A species of snapping shrimp named after the famous English rock band. Zyzyxia lundellii and Zyzzyzus warreni. A solitary acacia that was once the most isolated tree on Earth before being run over by a drunken Libyan truck driver. Trees planted from seeds that were taken into space by Apollo An 80, year old quaking aspen colony that is believed to be one of the oldest and heaviest organisms on the planet.

A tulip tree located in northeastern Queens , New York City , that is confirmed to be the oldest living thing in the New York metropolitan area, as well as the tallest tree in the NY metro area. It was alive before the birth of Shakespeare. Tree of Knowledge Australia. Tree That Owns Itself. An oak tree in Athens, Georgia which is popularly regarded as owning itself. An analog computer built in Ancient Greece. What do you get if your cross an F1 car and a vacuum cleaner?

Or "Digesting Duck", an automaton built to simulate a duck eating, digesting, and excreting. A hundred-year-old light bulb that has been burning nonstop for 41 years. Unlike an analog sundial , a clock that indicates the current time with numerals formed by the sunlight striking it. A device made with a light bulb and a record turntable that reportedly induces lucid dreaming. And you thought the makers of Die Another Day made it up. There's still no news about invisible Aston Martin V12 Vanquishes.

Alleged spiritual voices heard in white noise and radio interference. Film actress co-invents communication system later used in cell phones , Wi-Fi and other forms of wireless technologies. History of perpetual motion machines. Spheres with three parallel grooves dated to be three billion years old Evidence of ancient intelligent life? An unusual natural phenomenon? List of inventors killed by their own inventions. Why it's always a bad idea to put the guy next door out of business if he has a ten-ton armor-plated bulldozer in his garage.

Not to forget the CIA's own pigeon camera. Chilean robo-socialism control chamber invented by a Brit with a gigantic beard. Royal Mail rubber band.

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Russian floating nuclear power station. A cross between a spoon and a fork. Not to be confused with a knork. Meteorology by frightened annelid. How to measure your emotional response to androids. A Chinese robot, according to the Japanese, that will save its country from corporate capitalism with its crotch cannon. A congealed lump of fat and non-biodegradable buildup in sewer systems.

A metre-long, tonne specimen was discovered under London in September Microsoft's attempt to bring you the interwebzzz inside the portable public loo. Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. A s organization whose campaign was to end pay toilets in the United States of America. List of people who died on the toilet.

Possibly the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found, discovered under the future site of a Lloyds Bank in England. Not all injuries and deaths linked to toilets are urban legends. A fake penis used to beat drug tests complete with dried urine, heater, syringe.

Comes in white, tan, Latino, brown, and black. International holiday declared by the United Nations. An unusual traditional garment of western New Guinea , also known as the "penis gourd". Meat dress of Lady Gaga. A marketing mishap, many well-meaning young women, and vanity came together to form this demographic.

A T-shirt with wolves howling at the moon that gained popularity after one person wrote a parodic review for it on Amazon. Two Japan Airlines aircraft were roughly meters away from causing the deadliest aviation accident in history. British Rail flying saucer. China National Highway traffic jam. The world's longest-lasting traffic jam, in which some drivers were stuck for up to 5 days, moving only 1km 0.

The day that Sweden changed its traffic directionality. A concept car with 3 wheels. It was 20 feet 6. Get Out and Push Railroad. A confusion over units leads to a Boeing plane running out of fuel mid-flight and becoming a glider. Not your local Bible-thumping preacher but the bolt on the top of a helicopter that connects it to the rotor blades.

Loose wheel nut indicator. An Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from until A car buried in a time capsule in and unearthed in , only to discover that it had suffered 50 years of water damage underground and wouldn't start. Why passengers must be discouraged from flushing or using toilets while the train is at a station. A Soviet attempt at a turbofan -powered crop duster. It is the slowest jet aircraft to enter production as well as the only jet biplane or jet crop duster to exist.

A three-wheeled car formerly manufactured in England that could be driven with a motorcycle license. The delivery of mail by rocket or missile, attempted by various organisations in many different countries, with varying levels of success. A color especially formulated for use on school buses in the United States. The concept and art of using intermodal containers to build stuff. An association formed to oppose the custom of addressing railway sleeping car porters as "George" regardless of their actual name.

All railroads lead to Rome. With "no smoking" signs, although tobacco was unknown to ancient Romans Westray to Papa Westray flight.

The world's shortest passenger flight, lasting as little as 53 seconds. Just don't expect an in-flight meal. Niue's top-level domain, which is regulated by Sweden and almost exclusively used by European countries. A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers.

He's so smart, he has his own cellular automaton. A pair of mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of spare parts. Refers to programming languages designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as jokes, and not with the intention of being adopted for real-world programming. If you thought the blue screen of death was bad, this computer error would hamper your quest to reach Nirvana.

Protocol for controlling and monitoring coffee pots. Attempting to use a teapot while brewing coffee will yield you the "HTTP I'm a teapot" error message. IP over Avian Carriers. An Internet protocol for sending data packets using homing pigeons. A computer peripheral designed to emit smells for websites and emails, later named one of the "Worst Tech Products" by PC Magazine.

How an image of a nude Playboy model became the industry-standard digital image compression test subject. Want to panic a Unix user? Display an error that their printer is on fire. Vintage Macintosh computers-turned- fishtanks. A water-based analogue computer used to model the United Kingdom economy, bringing a new meaning to the term liquidity. A academic paper which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness. Spam filtering based on text strings can cause problems.

A biblical-themed operating system designed by a single schizophrenic programmer over the course of 10 years. Trojan room coffee pot. The fascinating target of the world's first webcam: A 3D model which has become a standard reference object and something of an in-joke in the computer graphics community. A joke considered to be both "the world's funniest" and "the world's worst".

Also a documentary of the same name. A unique experiment in "broadwebcasting", Bigipedia is the website on your radio. In association with Chianto—"Officially recognised by the EU as a wine-type product or by-product". A fictitious student officially enrolled at Georgia Tech in , and, except for his "service" in World War II, has been continuously enrolled at the school ever since. List of defunct amusement parks. A Hong Kong resident gets into an uncomfortably tense argument with a fellow passenger—all caught on video.

A perennial parody of Conan the Barbarian that has appeared in film, television, comics, and fan fiction. Cultural depictions of Napoleon. It's not just Hello Kitty and Pikachu. A recent development in American popular culture in which the playful trope of the clown is rendered as disturbing through the use of dark humor and horror elements. Wherein a group of people quickly meet up, engage in a random action such as a pillow fight , then disappear just as quickly.

Do your bit to save the rainforest —have an orgy! One of the latest trends to be popularized by hyphy culture. Bad weather isn't the only reason to avoid the summit of Mount Washington. The approving use of Nazi-era style, imagery, and paraphernalia in clothing and popular culture. New York got blown up by the Tsar Bomba! Well, at least you can do that in this. An activity in which assorted tricks are used to manipulate a pen in aesthetically pleasing ways.

A French entertainer famous in Victorian times for being able to break wind at will. One tough guy who, to escape from death, cut off his own arm with a dull knife after a boulder fell on it. Popular jokes in India , based on stereotypes of Sikhs. List of school pranks. The fictitious mining of treacle molasses in a raw form similar to coal. The World Famous Bushman.

You kids get off my lawn! A modern art piece created by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. His sister, who mistook it for trash, threw it out. Chamber of Art and Curiosities. A larger-than-life, ton sculpture of a brontosaurus in the desert of Southern California west of Palm Springs. Dinny's companion is "Mr. Rex," a ton sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square. An 18 foot, 13, pound concrete sculpture of a troll clutching a VW beetle located in Fremont.

A giant straw Yuletide goat that is the target of frequent arson attacks and vandalism. Oxford man has had a foot 7. The entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art. An artist who attempted to draw the "Picture of Everything", a massive painting containing drawings of thousands of people and items, both real and imaginary. NY Hip hop graffiti knitters. A Picasso painting that purportedly would have sold for a record price had its owner, Steve Wynn , not accidentally poked a hole in it, and which eventually did sell for a different record price.

Largest photographs in the world. List of fictional colors. Museum of Bad Art. Paintings by Adolf Hitler. The Nazi dictator and perpetrator of one of the worst genocides was also a painter. Used for plain tobacco packaging. Portland International Airport carpet. A Mexican sculptor who made a name for himself in ice and snow sculpture after winning gold at the Winter Olympics.

There's also a "Holy Mackerel", Batman. Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism. A statue in Liverpool that's half-lamb, half-banana. An odd painting of a grinning face, that used to be on the Palace Amusements building in Asbury Park, New Jersey before it was demolished. Central Asian history has never been cuter. Osama bin Laden makes an appearance as a turban-wearing stray cat. Archie Meets the Punisher. The first applicant to be rejected from the Legion of Super-Heroes , his superpower was the ability to temporarily detach either arm and use it as a club with the other.

A comic book character from none other than Vertigo Comics. Name of a Japanese manga comic whose subject matter is as surreal as its title. In animation , humour takes precedence over the ordinary laws of physics. A group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons pulled from syndication due to their racist depictions of black people. A fictional family in the style of a Scottish clan , from which a great number of Walt Disney Company 's comic book characters held their origin..

Donald Duck won an Oscar as a Hitler-saluting Nazi. A curious abundance of gorillas in comic book plots during the Silver Age of Comics. Homosexuality in the Batman franchise. For half a century, Batman and Dick Grayson have been rumored to have a relationship. An open-source webcomic character. Nothing says s in the USA more than a spinoff of Schoolhouse Rock with superheroes who teach the metric system.

A Marvel Comics superhero with no special powers except immortality , who has been killed in ways including crushing, burning, self-impalement on giant novelty scissors, bear trap, cannon, chainsaw, piranhas, ferrets, spear, and python, and alcohol poisoning three times. Prone to fits of rage upon returning to life. Human- cephalopod sexual relations, popular in hentai. An animated series about everyone in the world's magical uncle and grandpa. Published in as a Victorian children's book and described as "a round game for merry parties", the object of the game was to quickly recite alphabetical tongue-twisting mock-Latin gibberish.

A group of science fiction authors get together and deliberately write an absolutely horrible novel to fool and embarrass a " vanity publisher ". The Book of Heroic Failures. A book which glorifies failure. The book was a success and thus declared a "failure as a failure". La Bougie du Sapeur. A French newspaper published every February 29th. An essay written by Benjamin Franklin about flatulence.

Writer of a 15,page manuscript along with several thousand watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story, who rarely left his small room. His word was worth millions a few years after his death. Early American editions of The Hobbit. English As She Is Spoke. A 19th-century Portuguese — English conversational guide and phrase book that is regarded as a classic of unintentional humour since it was apparently the product of translating a Portuguese—French phrase book by non-English-speaking Portuguese with the help of a French—English phrase book.

An infamously bad heroic fantasy novella , written in by Jim Theis and circulated anonymously in science fiction fandom since then. Supposedly the shortest story possible in the English language, though Ernest Hemingway had nothing to do with it. At the start of the 16th century, British schoolmasters were insulting one another.

In Latin, of course. A non-existent novel that was the subject of a hoax intended to criticize the manner in which best-seller lists are determined. A poem written by a Chinese poet in Classical Chinese. It can be read and understood by all who understand the language, even though it consists entirely of the word "shi" repeated 92 times in different tones.

List of works with the subtitle "Virtue Rewarded". A racist stock character who helps out white protagonists. A theory which states that Christopher Marlowe 's unnatural death was a hoax and that he continued to write and publish under the pseudonym " William Shakespeare ". A homoerotic homophonic translation of Homer: A day, O Achilles.

The Meaning of Hitler. My Immortal fan fiction.

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Rowling 's wizarding world. Someone who may have been the author of the piece almost got a major publishing deal for her memoirs. Naked Came the Stranger. Journalists prove a point when their intentionally awful sex novel becomes a bestseller. Later the basis of a porn film starring Darby Lloyd Rains. Order of the Occult Hand. A very serious essay by Harry Frankfurt sketching a philosophical theory of, well, bullshit. Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Understanding the political context of the mid-to-late s in the United States will give you a different understanding of the gold, silver and emerald symbolism, among other things.

It doesn't cover music, but does list the names of alleged homosexuals, calling for their deaths. The McGonagall of prose. Lewis competed as to who could read her longest without laughing. A great conspiracy that concealed the identity of the true author of "Shakespeare's" works, implying that all contemporary references to Shakespeare's authorship were fraudulent or mistaken. Anti-Stratfordians can take heart that there really are works attributed to Shakespeare that weren't written by him! Angus McDiarmad, a native Scots-Gaelic speaker, writes a book on a Scottish Highland area with the help of an English dictionary to great comic effect and is termed "the world's worst author".

Le Train de Nulle Part. A number of prominent musicians have died at this age, though statisticians attribute the "club" to apophenia - seeing patterns in random data. See also the related white lighter myth. A three-piece movement composed by John Cage in which the musicians are instructed to not play a single note. The practice of taking lyrics of foreign songs, "mishearing" them into English, and producing a Flash video to go along with it.

As Slow As Possible. A piece of music by John Cage to be performed until What happens to Wikipedia article titles when two different bands with the same exact name both release self-titled albums. The Boy Bands Have Won. As of August , it holds the record for the longest album title. The term was invented to make fun of music journalists and bloggers who hype "the next big thing". Ironically, they then wrote about chillwave as "the next big thing". The ancestor of Vaporwave. An entire record by Green Day whose master tracks were stolen. The very complicated story of the Beach Boys ' " teenage symphony to God ", an album of psychedelic children's songs about spiritual rebirth , American imperialism , cartoons, and exercising.

The superstition that any composer of symphonies, from Beethoven onwards, will die soon after writing their own Ninth Symphony. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night of the Soul. Dark Side of the Rainbow. The Belgian entry of the Eurovision Song Contest whose lyrics spoke precisely of the event in which they took part.

That time John Fogerty was sued for sounding like himself. The organizers spent so much money promoting the event that they ran out of money to spend on the actual event. They were later faced with eight lawsuits. That time a receptionist convinced The New York Times that "wack slacks" was slang for ripped jeans and "lamestain" meant an uncool person. A pianist who had many doctored recordings falsely attributed to her long after she stopped performing in public.

A string quartet by Karlheinz Stockhausen that must be played in four circling helicopters , the sound remixed, chopper sounds and all, for an audience on the ground. Mercurial hippie outcast of the Hollywood music biz that never received financial compensation for his songs and records. Thought to be dead after the s, but then resurfaced with a blog in aiming to set the record straight about his life story.

Jeg har set en rigtig negermand. A Danish 1 single from , extolling the virtues of racial equality while calling a "negro man" "black as a bucket of tar". An American soprano famous for her singing ability or lack thereof. Leck mich im Arsch. Never officially released, and yet fans and critics can argue that it's the best "album" by the Dave Matthews Band. List of musical works in unusual time signatures. What's the most absurd time signature you can imagine? List of silent musical compositions. Not to be confused with " The Sound of Silence ", these songs don't have really much to hear.

List of songs topping polls for worst songs. What happens when you replace the lyrics in a music video with lyrics that describe what's actually happening in the music video? A album by Lou Reed that consists of 64 minutes of audio feedback , widely believed to have either been an elaborate joke, or an attempt by Reed to escape from a record label contract.

A blind composer, theoretician, poet, and inventor of musical instruments who dressed like a viking and lived as a street musician in New York between the s to s. A one-man band who has self-released over albums through his home-based mailing service since Later noted as a pioneer of lo-fi music and indie rock. The Most Unwanted Song. Featuring operatic rapping, a children's choir urging listeners to go to Wal-Mart , bagpipes, cowboy music, and political slogans shouted through a bullhorn. A system written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , in which the musical piece is decided randomly by playing dice.

This album by Jean-Michel Jarre had only a single copy produced, which was then auctioned off like a painting. The master tapes were subsequently destroyed, making the copy unique. You can get killed for singing Frank Sinatra 's signature tune in the Philippines. The Beach Boys' collaboration with Charles Manson. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. The whimsical universe surrounding the P Funk all stars. Was Paul McCartney replaced by a lookalike in the s? Take an unfinished studio album, hold a press conference at Kmart , and put on a show in countries around the world, complete with a spinning mirrorball lemon, a giant martini olive, a large golden arch, and the largest video screen ever toured.

That would be U2 's —98 tour in a nutshell. As part of a crackdown on drug cartels in Rio de Janeiro , this uniquely Brazilian form of gangsta rap cannot legally be performed or broadcast on the radio. A mystery wrapped in an enigma related to Pink Floyd , which has remained unsolved since it appeared on Usenet in A song mentioned in a top songs list of a notable magazine, that was long-believed by some to be non-existent because collectors were unable to find a recording or further information on it until 33 years after it was written. None of this band's members really wanted to form a band, nor did they really have any musical talent, but hey, a fortune teller predicted success, so off they went William Shatner's musical career.

His rendition of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds regularly wins radio station competitions to find the "worst music of all time". To Anacreon in Heaven. An 18th-century drinking song whose melody was later adopted for " The Star-Spangled Banner ". Unbelievably, the band's name was purely coincidental. An instrument in Newfoundland , an insult everywhere else. Abrasive single by Cornish electronic musician Richard D.

James, otherwise known as Aphex Twin. At a full 1. A rock band made up of elderly musicians. As of [update] , the oldest member had lived to An Alan Smithee Film: A movie about a director who makes a bad movie, but can't remove his name from the credits because his real name is Alan Smithee. In reality, the movie about the movie was so bad that director Arthur Hiller was credited as Alan Smithee to disguise himself from the production.

A film scheduled to be released on New Year's Eve that is planned to be 30 days long. A trailer released in lasted 7 hours 20 minutes, and another one due in is expected to last three days. It is then planned for the film to be destroyed after its sole showing. A mysterious object usually of extraterrestrial origin in a film that is there simply to cause a sense of wonder.

The answer to the question: What could be worse than a Sharknado? A completed feature-length film with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd that has never been released and may never be released. The best way to keep the paparazzi away from your movie: A mockumentary released in that asserts that Canada is subverting the United States by taking over its media.

A mockumentary that claimed that the World Cup was never actually held. Despite being revealed as a hoax at the end, people still believed it. The Cure for Insomnia. The Day the Clown Cried. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer 's favorite time of the year. A film by Andy Warhol consisting entirely of eight hours of still footage of the Empire State Building. Proof that the Soviets got there, thirty years before Armstrong and Aldrin didn't. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. A Hong Kong actor repeatedly cast in Stephen Chow films as a nose-picking, bearded transvestite.

List of films featuring giant monsters. List of films that most frequently use the word "fuck". The world's longest movie ever made, it follows the entire five week process of making and selling a pedometer in reverse chronological order. A movie that runs for 48 hours. Despite its title, it isn't the world's longest movie , but the jury's still out on whether it's the most meaningless The Hands of Fate. A low-budget film created by a fertilizer salesman from Texas, which is largely considered to be the worst film of all time. The second longest film ever shot: The directors have a point. The film that was released to drive-ins when it was only halfway completed.

In order to get around this, the ending consists of narration explaining what happened to the main characters and the titular monster. As if that wasn't bad enough, it spawned a sequel. There are certain rules one follows when making an Oscar film. Including mental illness , the Holocaust and Meryl Streep in your film also helps. A Godzilla -esque film, supposedly an allegory for unchecked capitalism, created by Kim Jong-il and a director whom he kidnapped. The first ever moving picture , which lasted for an epic two seconds. Why prefers his martini shaken.

Dirk Benedict and snakes. Long before the day of Samuel L. Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Large marshmallow mascot seen in the film Ghostbusters. Possibly the most frequently quoted and misquoted line from a movie ever.