To be clear, I don't know that it explains the differences between liberals and conservatives. For one, I don't think liberalism and conservatism lie on a single line, but are multi-dimensional. For another, I'm generally skeptical of social psychological research, because, well, social psychology has given us a lot of reasons to be skeptical. But I'm definitely willing to entertain them as possible explanations; I'm just not clear on the causal relationships between personality and policy, particularly in an age of mass media and propaganda.
It's the first instance I've seen. Every other time I've seen this research discussed on the right, it's been critical. Doesn't mean that no one else on the right agrees with it.
And to the extent that we can trust the research, we know that the political psychology research on psychological differences between liberals and conservatives has predictive power, because that's what they do in a bunch of those studies, so I'm less interested in talking about predictive power than causal relations between the psychology and the positions.
I've read this paper, part of a few decades of consistent findings in political psychology showing that "liberals" (in the American political sense) are universalists, more open to experience, have lower need for control, etc., while conservatives are more "parochial," have lower tolerance for novel experiences, more need for control, etc. Conservatives have generally pushed back on this research, and Haidt in particular has argued that it reflects liberal biases in the social/behavioral sciences. I think this might be the first instance I've seen of someone on the right using it as an accurate description of the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives.
It would be interesting to see an argument from the right on how this specific difference (or the broader differences identified in political psychological research) is causally related to differences in political values and policy preferences.
"Cinch" is an old term for the pennant, or the team that is a cinch to win the pennant (see: cinch)."Arabella Cinch" is a human manifestation of the pennant, and wedding her means winning it.
At least we know what Israeli autonomy looks like: brutal repression, ethnic cleansing, and the occasional full-on genocide. Even if the end of the Occupation doesn't produce ideal results, it's unlikely to be worse overall than the status quo.
Very weird to say that a $1000 a month payment reduced income by $1500 a year, excluding the $12,000 a year. In other words, people made an average of $10,500 more a year, but they worked a bit less (about 1.3 fewer hours a week), because they could afford to, and the Heritage Foundation and their friends spin this as a bad thing. One of the Heritage Foundations negative takeaways is "Less work was used for more leisure instead of productive activities." So, as the paper they're half-reading says, people spent more time with their children, relatives and friends, and to Reason and Heritage, and apparently you, that's a bad thing! Seriously, y'all are unserious people.
The other big take away was that $10,000 extra a year didn't solve all people's financial problems, which is unsurprising given how poor most of the participants were, but there was a bunch of good, and averaging across participants likely produces some of the overall results that don't take into account demographic differences, e.g., "exploratory analysis of subgroups suggests that
not all responses to the transfer were identical: older participants experienced very little change in
either labor supply or human capital, while younger participants reduced time spent working but appeared to pursue more education."
There are two things here: getting rid of the Apartheid system was an unequivocal good, as would be ending the Occupation. The government that followed was not great, and has gotten worse, for a variety of reasons, and that is bad. It's entirely possible that any post-Occupation government will be bad.
Except the cops didn't show up because she used the wrong pronouns. Your own articles says that, as I noted above, and you seemed to acknowledge subsequently. I don't know why we'd go in a circle in which you say it happened, I point out it didn't happen, you agree, I say "So you just made it up," and then you say, "Not at all, because it happened."
Ah yes, there's a law against something else, which has never, to either of our knowledge, resulted in someone getting in trouble for using the wrong pronouns, but it could happen, if a certain set of conditions hold in the future, so we might as well say now that they have laws against misgendering.
Strong " If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the [English] people" vibes.
And people push back so hard against them precisely because they don't want these things to become accepted truths in a generation. See also that Coates article and the comparison to slavery and segregation.
Even a quick scan of that article will tell you that it wasn't about the pronouns (or at least, not "just" about the pronouns), and a quick search will tell you that no such law exists.
If this blog had existed in 1967, or 1987, there'd have been a WWII generation or Boomer Jaybird saying the exact same things about anti-Vietnam War or anti-Apartheid protests.
I think it's a mistake to see cultural phenomena disconnected from everything else in such a way that the trends within it are merely "flights of fancy." The identity stuff that exists predominately, but not exclusively, within middle class society to be sure, but it exists in a broader context of changing gender roles, relations, and yes, identities, as well changes in racial dynamics across society. Educated middle class adults may be grasping on to this fad or that fad, but these changes are even more radical, and ingrained, among young people across racial and socioeconomic boundaries, where the cutting edge of the way identity is treated sometimes makes pronouns in email signatures and land acknowledgments look long outdated. So sure, there will be fads among the elites and the virtue hoarders (as Catherine Liu calls them), but barring a major shift in culture among young people, ways of treating identity that make older, (personally, if not politically) conservative people squirm, are probably here to stay, and will only become more dominant, though they will also likely become less... empty, as young people live the concepts rather than merely speak them.
I know you think this is a gotcha, but of course, I'm not the one who comments just about every day on this blog justifying brutality and genocide, so it's significantly less of one coming from you than you think.
The equivalent, from the reverse perspective, given that you are under 80, would of course be "where have you been every day of your life?"
It's going to be interesting to watch how much this makes some liberals squirm: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ta-nehisi-coates-new-book-message-israel-palestine-complicated.html
I assume where Harris is going to have real problems is not with electorally-minded leftists, but with usually reliable Dem voters, in Michigan in particular, who will note vote for this administration unless they take drastic action to stop the genocide, which they of course will not do. I don't know if there are enough such voters to cause her to lose the election, but if I were on her team I'd be a bit concerned.
Excluding people who openly consider themselves "TradCaths", conservative Catholics do seem surprisingly close-lipped about electoral politics, particularly given how closely aligned their cultural politics have become with Evangelicals, a group of people who can't shut up about electoral politics.
I dunno how representative my own wider social circle is, but both in person and online, but among the electorally-minded leftists (basically, DSA and Berniecrats), it seems the majority are not only going to hold their noses and vote for Harris, but are trying to convince everyone else to do so as well. There are still a substantial number of holdouts, mostly over the Occupation and the ongoing genocide, but I suspect that the majority of leftier folks who voted for Biden (and most Bernie voters did) will vote for her.
I've only seen a handful of Stein defenders, well down from '16 and even '20 (when there were significantly fewer than '16), so the battle will probably be to convince the holdouts to vote in the presidential election at all.
I spent 2 weeks in Florida in November 2020 (with family, who'd just moved out there the week before, so we were part of each other's bubble, or whatever we were calling it by that point). Soon after arriving, I walked to a gas station near their home, and it was the first time I'd been to any public place in months in which absolutely no one (but me) was wearing a mask. And I live in Texas. I don't think I saw more than a handful of people in masks in that 2 week period. It was surreal.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024”
That's ripe.
On “Why a Trump Loss is Best for Conservatives”
To be clear, I don't know that it explains the differences between liberals and conservatives. For one, I don't think liberalism and conservatism lie on a single line, but are multi-dimensional. For another, I'm generally skeptical of social psychological research, because, well, social psychology has given us a lot of reasons to be skeptical. But I'm definitely willing to entertain them as possible explanations; I'm just not clear on the causal relationships between personality and policy, particularly in an age of mass media and propaganda.
"
It’s not. But okay.
It's the first instance I've seen. Every other time I've seen this research discussed on the right, it's been critical. Doesn't mean that no one else on the right agrees with it.
And to the extent that we can trust the research, we know that the political psychology research on psychological differences between liberals and conservatives has predictive power, because that's what they do in a bunch of those studies, so I'm less interested in talking about predictive power than causal relations between the psychology and the positions.
"
I've read this paper, part of a few decades of consistent findings in political psychology showing that "liberals" (in the American political sense) are universalists, more open to experience, have lower need for control, etc., while conservatives are more "parochial," have lower tolerance for novel experiences, more need for control, etc. Conservatives have generally pushed back on this research, and Haidt in particular has argued that it reflects liberal biases in the social/behavioral sciences. I think this might be the first instance I've seen of someone on the right using it as an accurate description of the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives.
It would be interesting to see an argument from the right on how this specific difference (or the broader differences identified in political psychological research) is causally related to differences in political values and policy preferences.
On “The Baseball Rialto”
"Cinch" is an old term for the pennant, or the team that is a cinch to win the pennant (see: cinch)."Arabella Cinch" is a human manifestation of the pennant, and wedding her means winning it.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/23/2024”
Only had to kill 300 people in the same carpet bombing to do it.
"
At least we know what Israeli autonomy looks like: brutal repression, ethnic cleansing, and the occasional full-on genocide. Even if the end of the Occupation doesn't produce ideal results, it's unlikely to be worse overall than the status quo.
"
Very weird to say that a $1000 a month payment reduced income by $1500 a year, excluding the $12,000 a year. In other words, people made an average of $10,500 more a year, but they worked a bit less (about 1.3 fewer hours a week), because they could afford to, and the Heritage Foundation and their friends spin this as a bad thing. One of the Heritage Foundations negative takeaways is "Less work was used for more leisure instead of productive activities." So, as the paper they're half-reading says, people spent more time with their children, relatives and friends, and to Reason and Heritage, and apparently you, that's a bad thing! Seriously, y'all are unserious people.
The other big take away was that $10,000 extra a year didn't solve all people's financial problems, which is unsurprising given how poor most of the participants were, but there was a bunch of good, and averaging across participants likely produces some of the overall results that don't take into account demographic differences, e.g., "exploratory analysis of subgroups suggests that
not all responses to the transfer were identical: older participants experienced very little change in
either labor supply or human capital, while younger participants reduced time spent working but appeared to pursue more education."
"
It's a fairly informative article.
On “Why a Trump Loss is Best for Conservatives”
There are two things here: getting rid of the Apartheid system was an unequivocal good, as would be ending the Occupation. The government that followed was not great, and has gotten worse, for a variety of reasons, and that is bad. It's entirely possible that any post-Occupation government will be bad.
"
Except the cops didn't show up because she used the wrong pronouns. Your own articles says that, as I noted above, and you seemed to acknowledge subsequently. I don't know why we'd go in a circle in which you say it happened, I point out it didn't happen, you agree, I say "So you just made it up," and then you say, "Not at all, because it happened."
Perhaps you have another example?
"
Ah yes, there's a law against something else, which has never, to either of our knowledge, resulted in someone getting in trouble for using the wrong pronouns, but it could happen, if a certain set of conditions hold in the future, so we might as well say now that they have laws against misgendering.
Strong " If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the [English] people" vibes.
"
And people push back so hard against them precisely because they don't want these things to become accepted truths in a generation. See also that Coates article and the comparison to slavery and segregation.
"
Even a quick scan of that article will tell you that it wasn't about the pronouns (or at least, not "just" about the pronouns), and a quick search will tell you that no such law exists.
"
They like to memory hole most things about him.
"
If this blog had existed in 1967, or 1987, there'd have been a WWII generation or Boomer Jaybird saying the exact same things about anti-Vietnam War or anti-Apartheid protests.
"
Huh?
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/23/2024”
I think it's a mistake to see cultural phenomena disconnected from everything else in such a way that the trends within it are merely "flights of fancy." The identity stuff that exists predominately, but not exclusively, within middle class society to be sure, but it exists in a broader context of changing gender roles, relations, and yes, identities, as well changes in racial dynamics across society. Educated middle class adults may be grasping on to this fad or that fad, but these changes are even more radical, and ingrained, among young people across racial and socioeconomic boundaries, where the cutting edge of the way identity is treated sometimes makes pronouns in email signatures and land acknowledgments look long outdated. So sure, there will be fads among the elites and the virtue hoarders (as Catherine Liu calls them), but barring a major shift in culture among young people, ways of treating identity that make older, (personally, if not politically) conservative people squirm, are probably here to stay, and will only become more dominant, though they will also likely become less... empty, as young people live the concepts rather than merely speak them.
"
I know you think this is a gotcha, but of course, I'm not the one who comments just about every day on this blog justifying brutality and genocide, so it's significantly less of one coming from you than you think.
The equivalent, from the reverse perspective, given that you are under 80, would of course be "where have you been every day of your life?"
"
It's going to be interesting to watch how much this makes some liberals squirm: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ta-nehisi-coates-new-book-message-israel-palestine-complicated.html
On “History Will Be Made: Harris VS Trump”
I assume where Harris is going to have real problems is not with electorally-minded leftists, but with usually reliable Dem voters, in Michigan in particular, who will note vote for this administration unless they take drastic action to stop the genocide, which they of course will not do. I don't know if there are enough such voters to cause her to lose the election, but if I were on her team I'd be a bit concerned.
"
Excluding people who openly consider themselves "TradCaths", conservative Catholics do seem surprisingly close-lipped about electoral politics, particularly given how closely aligned their cultural politics have become with Evangelicals, a group of people who can't shut up about electoral politics.
"
I dunno how representative my own wider social circle is, but both in person and online, but among the electorally-minded leftists (basically, DSA and Berniecrats), it seems the majority are not only going to hold their noses and vote for Harris, but are trying to convince everyone else to do so as well. There are still a substantial number of holdouts, mostly over the Occupation and the ongoing genocide, but I suspect that the majority of leftier folks who voted for Biden (and most Bernie voters did) will vote for her.
I've only seen a handful of Stein defenders, well down from '16 and even '20 (when there were significantly fewer than '16), so the battle will probably be to convince the holdouts to vote in the presidential election at all.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/16/2024”
There were: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/nyregion/new-york-city-covid-speakeasies.html
"
I spent 2 weeks in Florida in November 2020 (with family, who'd just moved out there the week before, so we were part of each other's bubble, or whatever we were calling it by that point). Soon after arriving, I walked to a gas station near their home, and it was the first time I'd been to any public place in months in which absolutely no one (but me) was wearing a mask. And I live in Texas. I don't think I saw more than a handful of people in masks in that 2 week period. It was surreal.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.