WIRING OF THE BRAIN

Particularly since my wife died, I have been reading quite a bit about how the brain works and how you can change it.  But even in the case of Noah who has had one side of his brain removed, who is a good example of this, in which actions and thought usually done by the right brain are now done by the left (or is it vice versa, no matter).  In my wife's case, I think she could have recovered from her first stroke except something happened to destroy her will to fight her condition which makes it very hard when all the initiative had to come from someone else.  She really had to want to get better, but couldn't manage it.

But it occurs to me that one reason we don't understand Muslims, especially conservative Muslims, is that their brains are wired differently from ours and some may even believe in martyrs getting 72"virgins" ( apparently wives actually in heaven).*  Do female martyrs get 72 virginal men (husbands)?

And it is the same in the U.S. where the religious right is able to maintain all sorts of screwy ideas like raped women don't get pregnant and are obsessed with controlling women's bodies almost as much as Muslims.  And conservative Republicans really believe that all poor people are lazy, the government is coming to get their guns, and reducing taxes and getting rid of regulations will always improve the economy.    No showing of the facts will dissuade them as their brains are wired to believe this sort of thing. (Though personal income taxes were greatly reduced as were regulations under George W. Bush, we had economic disaster..  Both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton raised taxes a lot and we had the best economic climate of my long lifetime.)

We are also witnessing in this country a significant part of the government that is quite willing to go against the will of the people, even their own constituencies, on issue after issue: on background checks for gun purchases, on the minimum wage, and on a track to citizenship for long-term illegal immigrants, just to name a few,

It is even true on a national basis.   For some reason as a nation, our brains are wired to root for the mob (presumably the underdog).  We have done this with Egypt, with Libya (even giving air cover to the mob), with the Ukraine.  We actually also did this with the Taliban against the Russians.  When we don't like the mob, we will enter into nation building as we did with Iraq and are doing with Afghanistan.  And we have learned, or I hope we have, that the road to democracy is extremely difficult for people who have no history of democracy or suffered under a long-time dictatorship.  I wonder how you could have a real democracy in Iraq when 80% of the people are of one religion (Shiite) and 20% of another (Sunni) who hate each other.  Even in the U.S., a lot of people believe that a Muslim, say, cannot be president though there is nothing in the constitution that says that presidents must be Christians.

As I have said in a recent post to my blog, I think eventually we will look on Guantanamo Bay as a dark period in American history: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/06/guantonimo-

and-franz-kafka.html.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houri