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posted by mrpg on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe dept.

If you bail on an activity with a preschooler, you'd better have a good excuse.

That's because, according to research published this week in the journal Child Development, children as young as three and a half years old understand and value the obligations that accompany joint commitments. The researchers found that children who abandon a cooperative activity for an apparently selfish reason tend to prompt more resentment from their peers than those who quit the task for another reason.

These findings do not just build on a growing body of research suggesting that the very young possess moral capabilities that are more sophisticated than scientists previously thought. They also suggest that the notion of shared obligation is in some ways fundamental to Homo sapiens, the only known animal to create social institutions.

"The kinds of joint commitments we are seeing here in the three-year-olds can be scaled up into legal contracts, in which we mutually pledge to hold up our end of the bargain," says Margarita Svetlova, a visiting assistant professor at Duke University, who co-authored the study with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "If you really want, you could scale it up to the social contract in general."


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:41AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:41AM (#515342)

    For many, it isn't about a church. It's about family, the nation, and perhaps neighbors. Atheist conservatives exist.

    Liberals are plenty racist. It's just... different. One of my coworkers, who is black, had a weird encounter with this. He was at the supermarket with his baby. A white lady has an inappropriately positive reaction toward the baby, and then blurts out that her niece (some relative anyway, I forget exactly) is black too. There was no genuine appreciation for my coworker's baby. It was all about virtue signalling. That lady was uncomfortable with my black coworker because she is racist, but she is liberal so she puts on an act. I wish my coworker had thought to say "will you be my white friend?" to her, but he was too shocked to say much of anything.

    Note also that rich liberals hire hispanic house servants (not scary black ones) and supposedly need illegal aliens (essentially non-white slaves) to pick their vegetables. That idea of paying a living wage... what happened to it? Maybe only white people get to have it, but liberals don't actually want to pay?

    I don't think liberals even understand racism anymore. For them it's just an insult now, easy for conservatives to ignore. The Spanish language is not a race. Islam is not a race. Both are choices that people make; people aren't born that way.

    Liberals are not really better-off or more educated. Yes, if you look at the people with post-graduate degrees or the people earning in the top 1%, you'll find a slight bias toward being liberal. There are very few people like that, no matter what the politics. They are a rounding error. The poor and uneducated are numerous, and they are solidly liberal. You'll find conservatives in the middle, for both finances and education. Since the high-end finances and education (rich and PhD) people are so rare that they hardly count, it is more reasonable to say that the conservatives are better off and more educated.

    There is one more problem with this idea that liberals are better-educated, and it's a huge one. Look, consider a conservative machinist and a liberal with a PhD in modern dance. You may think the liberal is more educated, but I'm calling bullshit on that one. The machinist has learned (been "educated") to do something useful. The dancer... I'm sorry, that is just a failure at life.

    One more thing you didn't mention but probably also misunderstand: Strangely, conservatives now care more about LGBT people than liberals do. Conservatives in the USA remember the Pulse nightclub massacre, and they want LGBT people to be safe. Liberals have moved on to the next category of supposedly-oppressed victim, the very non-liberal refugee, and are quietly throwing LGBT (and women too) under the bus to do it.

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  • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:09PM (2 children)

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:09PM (#515526) Journal

    Strangely, conservatives now care more about LGBT people than liberals do.

    Horseshit.

    Conservatives in the USA remember the Pulse nightclub massacre, and it's their favorite subject of concern trolling to justify their bigotry.

    FTFY. I'll believe your horseshit when I stop seeing bathroom laws enacted. Or hell. At least fucking admit that trans men EXIST god fucking damn it to hell. People born “normal” women TRANSITION TO LIVE AS MEN. AT LEAST ADMIT THAT FUCKING SHIT.—THEY. FUCKING. EXIST.

    (I was triggered. Allow me to engage in the breathing exercises that are a healthy way of dealing with being triggered rather than hijacking that term from CBT/ACT therapy and using it for something that is the exact opposite of healthy CBT/ACT techniques. I can tell I've been triggered because I do not think I've correctly used the EM dash in the previous section. But this may trigger professional typographers! So we must move on.)

    My apologies. I unduly extrapolated from what you said and painted with a wide brush, as is one of my bad habits.

    But what exactly do you mean by conservative? Do you mean Gary Johnson? Do you mean Jeff Sessions? Do you mean Pat McCrory? Do you mean some big fans of Pat McCrory such as (I'm sure) Germaine Greer or Janice Raymond? While I'm at it why the fuck not Dr. Jill Stein? Now she's a conservative given a conservative definition of conservative! Everybody's conservative!

    Except Clinton♀ and Trump. They're just dipshits. Sad!

    Now, if you want to try again without using the language of an artificial political dichotomy rife with straw men that every man, woman, and child in the USA has been brainwashed since birth to accept, I will attempt to evaluate what you're saying again.

    I believe in the Second Amendment. Does that make me part of the Conservative tribe? I'm LGBT. Does that make me part of the Liberal tribe? I believe in states' rights and small government. Am I back in the conservative camp now? I believe in individual rights over states' rights (such as the right to grow, sell, and consume cannabis). Have I flopped back to the liberal camp now?

    Holy shit I can keep flip flopping all day! I think that Islam is just as much a religion of peace as Christianity and the other various Abrahamic religions (to reduce my more nuanced position to a sentence). Now I'm a liberal! (Or am I?) I think that we need to enforce laws against illegal immigration (to reduce my more nuanced position to a sentence). Now I'm a conservative! (Or am I?)

    One thing I do wonder, however, is if perhaps we are not somehow saying the same thing.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:21PM (#515642)

      We know where Milo went after Breitbart.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @01:12AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @01:12AM (#515782)

      The liberals have set a low standard for the conservatives to beat. The conservatives do in fact beat that standard. It's so easy: just don't eagerly welcome people who think that LGBT should all be killed.

      I can't even find an anti-LGBT American politician who endorses killing them all. There must be one somewhere...? Most of the Bible-thumper conservatives would rather pray for your soul. The others don't give a damn about you and your mental illness, other than wanting you to live. It's a very minimal sort of caring, but it's something, and it's genuine.

      Liberals pretend to like LGBT, but they really hate you. They will get muslims to do the dirty work of killing you.

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 26 2017, @02:00AM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday May 26 2017, @02:00AM (#515788)

    The thing about the black baby is silly: you have no idea of the politics of the white woman, and she could very well be a mainstream GOP voter (so-called "compassionate conservative") trying to be nice but fumbling horribly. Or she could be a Hillary voter again trying to be nice but stupidly. Trying to make her a representative of all liberals is pure idiocy, just like trying to claim that Michael Bloomberg is representative of all conservatives, including rural Southern voters.

    and supposedly need illegal aliens (essentially non-white slaves) to pick their vegetables. That idea of paying a living wage... what happened to it? Maybe only white people get to have it, but liberals don't actually want to pay?

    But this is easily disproven with simple logic, and really shows how terrible you are with basic logic and common sense (as if the baby anecdote wasn't enough): where did you ever get the idea that liberals shopping for vegetables have any control over how much workers are paid? And haven't you noticed that liberals have been screaming for increased minimum wages for ages now? Finally, what do you think the political persuasion of the vegetable farm owners is? (Hint: it isn't liberal; neither farmers nor agribusiness owners/execs are known for being liberal.)

    There is one more problem with this idea that liberals are better-educated, and it's a huge one. Look, consider a conservative machinist and a liberal with a PhD in modern dance. You may think the liberal is more educated, but I'm calling bullshit on that one. The machinist has learned (been "educated") to do something usefu

    Here you're just being stupid. Machinists do not have an education at all; they have training in a very narrow field. If you have no education in humanities, logic, critical thinking, etc., then you're not "educatied". That's why universities were invented, not to train people for jobs. You want job training, go to a trade school. You sound like someone who has no education and never went to college; people like you frequently poo-poo it because you don't understand the value of an education.

    As for "caring about' LGBT people, then why are conservatives trying to push them into Christian "conversion therapy" which is proven to not only not work, but to be mentally abusive? And why do Christian conservatives kick out and disown their LGBT kids as soon as they hit 18?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @06:48AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @06:48AM (#515864)

      Never mind the shoppers and the farmers. Whenever the topic of deportation comes up, liberals everywhere pipe up with the idea that our country can't get by without the illegally employed workers. How could that be true? The only way is that the workers are getting paid below the normal market value for their labor. By being here in great numbers and being willing to violate the law, these workers reduce the value of their labor below what is normal. To say that we need this is to say that we need to pay people below even our current minimum wage, never mind an increased one, and that this is acceptable when the people are hispanic.

      I did in fact suffer through a university education. I'm well aware that the non-technical classes are complete bullshit. The most ridiculous illogical nonsense would get an 'A' grade. (done it) You just have to spout the type of disinformation your professor likes. Had I internalized that nonsense, I'd have come out dumber. Logic and critical thinking are not taught in a normal university; that would encourage rejection of liberal values. Why is it that a person can get a PhD in modern dance without having to even pass a math course more complicated than 7th-grade algebra? Lacking that, it sure looks like the degree in modern dance is merely job training in a very narrow field. I can respect the machinist. Hell, I can respect the guy who fixes my roof and the guy who clears out my sewage pipes!

      You can kick LGBT kids out of the house and still be **relatively** kind to them. The standard for kindness has reached a new low. Liberals are welcoming supposed refugees who feel it is right to literally toss LGBT off of roofs. This isn't going to end well.