Physiognomy in Salon: "The nose represents a person’s relationship with money"

[muriel_volestrangler]

:banghead:

Rose Rosetree is looking up John McCain’s nostrils, and she’s seeing green -- green like dollar bills. McCain, she says, has a smallish nose and large, flared nostrils. The details of the Republican presidential nominee's schnoz tell Rosetree that McCain is “a relatively big spender” and “adventurous” with money. The rough texture of his nose tip and the slight angle toward the right suggest he’s not likely to change his spendthrift ways anytime soon.
...
While you might feel an immediate urge to call what Rosetree does pseudoscience, in all fairness, she doesn't claim to be scientific. The art of face reading, she says, descended from the millennia-old tradition of physiognomy, which was practiced by no less than the likes of Aristotle and Pythagoras. Face reading rests on the basic premise, as she says, “that your face is meaningful and not some blob that got put on you like Play-Doh.” A different kind of meaning is legible to Rosetree in each different part of the face. To name a few: The nose represents a person’s relationship with money; the cheeks reveal a relationship with power and its use; the right side of the face is associated with the professional life, the left side with the personal life. As a personality changes, the face changes to match. (Wrinkles, says Rosetree, are “God’s makeup.”)
...
Jowliness is one piece of “face data,” however, that McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, need not worry about. Though Palin shares McCain’s flared nostrils and rightward nose tilt -- which, Rosetree insists, has purely fiscal (not ideological) implications -- the Alaskan’s most defining feature is her square face. “There’s no particular part of her face that’s wider than the cheekbones. And that goes with a power style that I call the polite power style.” Polite? Palin, Rosetree says, has a “way of working the system. She figures out which strings to pull in order to get what she wants.” This seems like a fair enough description of Troopergate.
...
“He and Joe Biden are nostril twins," she says. "Both of them have that straight shape to their nostrils. What that signifies, with the nostril size being small, is when it comes to spending, there’s a tendency to be able to stick to a budget. He also has a chunky nose tip. For 5,000 years, people have said noses are about nose style and how people deal with money. Look at Bill Clinton, probably the biggest nose tip we ever had as president, and he left with the biggest amount of savings. Look at George Bush with his petite nose tip, or Reagan with his nose tip, and they left with deficits.”

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/10/15/nostril_twins/

via Pharyngula:

OK, this is the kind of thing that just pisses me off: the tendency for some liberals to go off all loopy and credulous. The perfect example is on Salon right now—an article that goes on at ridiculous length about the judgments of a physiognomist, a ditz who derives McCain's economic policy from the shape of his nostrils, and Obama's idealism from the breadth of his forehead. This is insane, and irritating, and stupid.

The one thing I dread with a Democratic victory is the ascendancy of navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons, without a shred of critical thinking.

Liberal Baloney

[Orrex]

1. My phrenologist told me that my recidivist tendencies would catch up with me

So I guess I'm living on borrowed time.


And Pharyngula is 100% correct. :shudder:

[moggie]

2. I didn't know that about square faces

Perhaps Obama should have picked Spongebob Squarepants as running mate. The thing about noses and money has a nasty, er, smell to it: think about all those caricatures of greedy Jews with huge noses.

[Random_Australian]

3. "the art"? You see, this is why people have such low opinions of arts degrees.

This couldn't possibly be someone deciding things about the candidates then putting a few bullshit words about faces in front of each, no?