I was wondering if you could describe dumb animals that rape and kill each other as cold and calculating and decided not.
Actually you can. Snakes can be described as cold and calculating. Also a serial killer that rapes and kills other humans can be described as cold and calculating depending on his style. But yes overall it does also carry this implication:
To me this article is suggesting libertarians are more intelligent.
And generally higher IQ is correlated in our society with more libertarian social and economical positions.
...Why? You can ascribe any adjectives to any nouns, but why would you associate these with snakes in particular? I mean, cold, yes, strictly speaking, unless they have been on a warm rock lately. Or even in the sense that they probably lack humanlike emotions, but is that even meaningful to say about a snake, and even if it is, why would you want to put it in such a negative-affect-laden way?
And calculating? My pet snake is probably way worse at math than the average dog, let alone a bright parrot or five-year-old human. What would she even calculate? She finds warmth appealing and cold unappealing and drinks when she’s thirsty and strikes when I dangle a dead mouse in front of her and flinches when surprised and hides under her half-a-log when she’s got nothing else to do; this is not rocket science, her brain is about the size of a small raisin and it doesn’t need to be any bigger.
The story I heard from reading Campbell’s myth series of books was that snakes were originally considered powerful and wise creatures because they knew the secrets of immortality—they could shed their skin and become young again. This got wrapped up into the general Semitic set of myths and tropes, where the snake re-appears in the… Garden of Eden tempting Adam & Eve into the Fall. Eventually it and the angel ‘Satan’ got wrapped up into a new Manichean framework as the source of all evil and the Evil One himself, whereupon the powerful and wise aspects became negative (my good mentor is ‘wise’; your evil mentor is ‘calculating’).
The cold part is probably just literal: I’ve never picked up a warm-feeling snake.
I’m not sure but I’ve heard them being described in that way. Maybe because they are literally cold blooded and people fear snakes, so they have the cultural association of sociopathy attached to them.
I wasn’t saying it was a good description, I was just saying it is a description people would use. People kind of anthropomorphize everything, children I’ve observed pretty much do assume on some level animals have human like minds but that they chose to behave differently from social norms.
Actually you can. Snakes can be described as cold and calculating. Also a serial killer that rapes and kills other humans can be described as cold and calculating depending on his style. But yes overall it does also carry this implication:
And generally higher IQ is correlated in our society with more libertarian social and economical positions.
...Why? You can ascribe any adjectives to any nouns, but why would you associate these with snakes in particular? I mean, cold, yes, strictly speaking, unless they have been on a warm rock lately. Or even in the sense that they probably lack humanlike emotions, but is that even meaningful to say about a snake, and even if it is, why would you want to put it in such a negative-affect-laden way?
And calculating? My pet snake is probably way worse at math than the average dog, let alone a bright parrot or five-year-old human. What would she even calculate? She finds warmth appealing and cold unappealing and drinks when she’s thirsty and strikes when I dangle a dead mouse in front of her and flinches when surprised and hides under her half-a-log when she’s got nothing else to do; this is not rocket science, her brain is about the size of a small raisin and it doesn’t need to be any bigger.
Sure. Have you never heard of an adder?
The story I heard from reading Campbell’s myth series of books was that snakes were originally considered powerful and wise creatures because they knew the secrets of immortality—they could shed their skin and become young again. This got wrapped up into the general Semitic set of myths and tropes, where the snake re-appears in the… Garden of Eden tempting Adam & Eve into the Fall. Eventually it and the angel ‘Satan’ got wrapped up into a new Manichean framework as the source of all evil and the Evil One himself, whereupon the powerful and wise aspects became negative (my good mentor is ‘wise’; your evil mentor is ‘calculating’).
The cold part is probably just literal: I’ve never picked up a warm-feeling snake.
I’m not sure but I’ve heard them being described in that way. Maybe because they are literally cold blooded and people fear snakes, so they have the cultural association of sociopathy attached to them.
I wasn’t saying it was a good description, I was just saying it is a description people would use. People kind of anthropomorphize everything, children I’ve observed pretty much do assume on some level animals have human like minds but that they chose to behave differently from social norms.