Lefties & righties

Prediction for 2015... Canada will have a federal election.

Lifetime rate of accuracy on predictions... 100%.

Resolution for 2015... Not to expound our Prime Minister with imperfect tenderness.

Lifetime rate for keeping resolutions... 0%

Lefties, southpaws. These terms describe a misunderstood group of people: left-handers. Lefties have been unfairly treated for hundreds of years. Lefties were thought to be dominated by the right hemisphere of the brain which deals with music, art, perception, emotions, and other forms of abstract thinking. With no left handed politician in the running for the 2015 election, Canada is in for more concrete heavy footed mathematical economic foolishness designed to keep our economy flourishing in a very crass manner to vanquish the 90% majority of right-handers, although many of these must be a touch ambidextrous because by their voting preferences they tend not all to support the total deregulation of banking, commerce, and industry.

 

Enmity against left-handers is thought to have begun with ancient sun worship. Most of these sun worshippers lived in the northern hemisphere and faced south when worshipping the sun. Under these conditions, the sun appears to move from left to right. Since the sun moved toward the right, ancient peoples saw everything related to the right "good" and everything having to do with the left as "bad."

The concept of left and right in political terms was coined during the French Revolution, and referred to where politicians sat in the French parliament; those who sat to the right of the chair of the parliamentary president were broadly supportive of the institutions of the monarchist régime. Throughout the 19th century, the main line dividing left and right in France was between supporters of the republic and supporters of the monarchy. This left - right terminology got itself exported to the British and the Americans and eventually to everywhere else including Canada.

Over time, progressives, communists, social-liberals, greens, social-democrats, socialists, democratic-socialists, left-libertarians, secularists, feminists, autonomists, anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, and anarchists all got labelled as lefties. Conservatives, reactionaries, neoconservatives, traditionalists, capitalists, neoliberals, right-libertarians, social-authoritarians, monarchists, theocrats, nationalists and fascists all got labelled as righties. The derogatory way the words are often used displaces real dialogue about policy by raising emotional prejudice against a preconceived notion of what the terms mean. In our modern complex world we actually combine political, economic and social dimensions and there are no political parties without some mix of socialistic and capitalistic values. The more extreme a government becomes in either direction, the more military force is needed to maintain it.

Today, neuroscientists know that the two sides of the brain work together to perform a wide variety of tasks and that the two hemispheres communicate through the corpus collosum. Recent research has shown that abilities in subjects such as math are actually strongest when both halves of the brain work together. The front portion of the corpus callosum though, has been reported to be significantly larger in musicians than nonmusicians, and to be 11% larger in left-handed and ambidextrous people than right-handed people.

Brains and politics, politics and brains. When both sides of either work together, communicating through their respective corpus collosums, we come up with our most sensible ambiances. Being a leftie however I still have a tendency to expound our Prime Minister with imperfect tenderness. It really has to do with my corpus collosum and ancient sun worship.