of having to risk not only their lives but that of their children and families in order to leave and save themselves and their families. she joins us now. she is a senior fellow the aat nyu s global afirz and focused on conflict resolution in afghanistan for the u.s. and for the u.s. we appreciate you being here today. last week 46 senators in this country wrote to officials asking for a special humanitarian pathway to the u.s. for women and leaders in afghanistan. you requested something similar. how urgent is this moment now? what do their lives look like under taliban control? prigt now, everyone that i speak to, every woman leader that i speak to isn t hiding. they re in their houses. the lights are off. trying to stay as discreet as pos ubl at their locations.
among them, we can expect movements who will advocate policies that may not be consistent with some of the west values, but i don t think these are movements that are interested in clashing with the west in terms of violating or threatening its security. i think that over the long run what the relationship between these movements and the west will turn out to be will depend on the kind of negotiating relationships that can be established between these movements and western governments. i don t think that we re going to be anytime soon looking at movements that produce social political orders that are carbon copies of the west. professor, there s an interesting article in the new york times from david kirkpatrick, and he said he heard the word freedom come up a lot. it got a different definition from the protestors. they were talking about, quote, the right of a community,
there s not a lot of sympathy for those at the bottom. both sides make arguments about fairness. we heard mitt romney about it s immoral to spend more than we take in. that s the equity thing. neither side is doing a good job of appealing to the american concerns for not just equity but equality of opportunity. that s one that i think romney has been weak on. professor, it may or may not please you to know that i wrote my religious thesis for my masters at nyu on comparing group behavior amongst religious folks and sports fans. you write in the righteous mind about our groupishness, our desire to be part of groups. i get that implicitly. explain to me want mind of the undecided or swing voter who seems very content to wait until the last minute to belong to a group. the most important fact about
minds no matter what they tell themselves. jonathan is a professor aat nyu and he s the author of the it yus mind, why good people are divided by politics and religion. jonathan, thanks for being here. i want to take it from the perspective of we have such a polarized electorate right now where people are clearly democrats and republicans and very few are in between. you have a very interesting explanation of how it is that people arrive at their conclusions whether it comes to making political opinions. take us through what the process is for people and how they form their political opinions. sure. so i study moral psychology. i do experiments on how people make moral judgments, and the basic finding is we make our moral judgments like we make our aesthetic judgments. we look at something and it looks good to us and ugly to us. we engage in reasoning, but that s what we do afterwards to justify ourselves and to persuade others to judge us. we re not good as weighing the costs and be
a lot of big egos and the terrain is changing. you could write the story about almost any campaign ever. the thing is that we have leaking and finger points, which tells me that a lot of people in boston in that romney campaign think we re losing. we need to make sure the right people need the blame, i.e., not me. they say stewart stevens does everything and everything he doesn t do, blame romney. the afghanistan omission in the rnc speech is addressed specifically saying it was their fault we gave them a speech with it in there. they didn t put it in. it will be interesting to watch how they get nemsz and act today. world events overshadowing this afternoon. a professor that lived here in and egypt helps us understand what s really going on over there. time for your business