Science may explain why the Left is the “party of poop”

toilet flushingIt cannot have escaped your notice over the years that the Left is obsessed with poop. In both the spoken and the written word, Leftists are more likely than conservatives to rely on obscenities, especially scatalogical references.  It’s for this reason that practically every fifth word Jon Stewart utters is bleeped out. Heck, they even like their entertainment to revolve around the more disgusting moments in life.

Leftists’ scatalogical obsession isn’t limited to language. They’re also entirely comfortable with the material fact of feces. Examples abound:

Item:  Leftist TV host Martin Bashir stated on television that someone should sh*t in Sarah Palin’s mouth.

Item:  At the Occupy Wall Street protest, one of the 99% was spotted leaving his mark on a New York City police car:

Item:  During the height of the Bush-era anti-war riots, one of the protesters was photographed as he proudly left his own personal offering on a smoldering American flag:

ItemThe Atlantic’s photographer, Jill Greenberg, when assigned to do a photoshoot of then candidate John McCain, does a little creative work on the side:

Item:  An Occupy Wall Street protester dumped a huge container of feces in the lobby at Chase Bank.

Item:  The general squalor at Occupy Wall Street sites meant that, when they were cleaned out, city officials all over America were forced to spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to clear out feces, vomit, and drug detritus which was scattered amongst the various tents in which the protesters “lived.”

Item:  Kathleen Ensz, a Weld County Democratic volunteer, left an envelope filled with dog feces at rival Republican campaign headquarters.

Although I always assumed that there was a Freudian reason behind the Lefts’ fecal fantasies (e.g., perhaps childhood trauma meant that they never matured beyond the “anal stage“), the Lefts’ poop obsession may in fact have a scientific basis.  A new study purports to show that, by measuring people’s response to disgusting images, one can determine their political party:

Some surprising research has come out of Virginia Tech. A group of international scientists has discovered that your brain’s response to disgusting images might be able to predict whether you are a liberal or conservative. The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Current Biology. Participants in the study were hooked up to a brain scanner then shown images of disgusting scenes such as, rotting carcasses, dirty toilets, and kitchen sink gunk. Participants were also shown neutral images, as well as pleasant images like babies and landscapes.

The study established that political conservatives react more strongly to revolting images. Because this study comes out of American academia, the study’s authors naturally conclude that this finding means that conservatives are more stupid and fearful, while liberals have big brains that override such primitive emotions:

The researchers are not sure why liberals and conservative brains react differently to disgusting images. The team did find that conservatives had more pronounced reaction to images of disgust. Previous studies have shown that conservatives tend to be more anxious and fearful which are associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. This suggests that conservatives are more likely to react strongly out of fear. On the other hand, liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex.

I actually have a different theory, one bolstered by my “party of poop” observations.  Rather than viewing conservatives as less highly developed, those study results prove that conservatives are more highly developed, more refined, more civilized and , more analytical.  Both genetically and emotionally, they have evolved far beyond the anal stage.

Meanwhile, liberals have much more primitive lizard brains and stalled emotional development, two factors that result in their comfort with feces, vomit, rot, and all the other detritus that people in a healthy, advanced civilization seek to dispose of and avoid.  Being more primitive, Leftists’, like dogs or pigs, are comfortable sniffing at and rolling around in the muck.

(NOTE:  I’ve had a little fun with all the photos to give them a unified look.  The underlying images, though, are what they are.)