We many, we happy many, we conservatives
It turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals. And that’s been true for thirty-five years, so it has nothing to do with what administration may or may not be in power at the moment.
This may explain why Michelle Obama seems so very unhappy despite her great blessings, and why she speaks to a certain constituency when she voices that bitterness—and it ain’t the “bitter clingers” of Pennsylvania she’s addressing.
According to Arthur Brooks, who wrote a book entitled Gross National Happiness, there are reasons for the greater happiness of conservatives. They are more likely to be married, religious, and parents—all three of which are characteristics that seem to lead to greater happiness, although this wouldn’t explain Ms. Obama. But here’s the bottom line:
Mr Brooks proposes that whatever their respective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one (in the American sense of both words). American conservatives tend to believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. This makes them more optimistic than liberals, more likely to feel in control of their lives and therefore happier. American liberals, at their most pessimistic, stress the injustice of the economic system, the crushing impersonal forces that keep the little guy down and what David Mamet, a playwright, recently summed up as the belief that “everything is always wrong”.
Bingo.
Opportunity is falling off trees in this country. I lived in an African country where people would give their right arm for 1/100th the opportunity we have here. Anyone who can’t see or appreciate that reality is bound to be unhappy. For them, the glass is 10% empty, not 90% full.
So Michelle Obama’s life isn’t perfect. Neither were those of the pioneers who lived in sod houses on the prairie or the people (masses of whom were poor immigrants) who built Chicago. But Michelle is now standing on the shoulders of those giants and complaining about the view.
Hello Neo,
For some reason, this reminds me of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC broadcast. It’s the leader of the Volgon constructor fleet said:
“I’ve just had an unhappy love affair, so I don’t see why anybody else should have a good time. Message ends.”
One factor, I think, is that many people seem to become involved in “progressive” politics as a way to find meaning which is otherwise missing in their lives.
Well, I think it works the other way, too. Someone who is happy is more likely to support the status quo rather than urging change. After all, if you like the way things are, why ruin it?
American liberals, at their most pessimistic, stress the injustice of the economic system, the crushing impersonal forces that keep the little guy down and what David Mamet, a playwright, recently summed up as the belief that “everything is always wrong.
There is a focus on what Progressives see as the negative aspects of American history, both past and contemporaneous. Because the historical viewpoint is skewed present day events appear to take on an perverse quality for them and all that happens is viewed through a certain dark prism. It’s a form of self-loathing that they believe Obama can assuage.
One of the originators of this viewpoint was Thoreau. He opened up a can of worms that has since destructively tunneled into the psyche of the Left. They are quick to believe the worst. I prefer the pre-revisionist historians, such as Will and Ariel Durant, who can be trusted to be objective and who published before Academia was taken over by the Left.
Reject lies, seek truth
Maybe luck into comfort
Neo happiness
At this point in my life, I’m really not the happiest I could be. I am not happy because of my own doing. Which, to take responsibility for my own misery, is more a Conservative idea, than a liberal one. Liberals point fingers, when they should be looking in the mirror. They are self-imposed, miserable, and perpetual victims. You’d think they were “palestinians”. 😉
Trimegistus Says:
“Well, I think it works the other way, too. Someone who is happy is more likely to support the status quo rather than urging change.”
I think your confusing happy and successful.
I was happy in my 20s.. with my wooden wire spool I used as a table, having my electricity turned off now and then, crappy car with transmission problems, and trouble affording food better than ramen and frozen burritos. Was also a conservative then too. 🙂
Oh yeah, things have changed. Now I 30 something and doing well.
Previously a lifelong Democrat, raised in New York and living in New York, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I’ve found myself slowly but surely leaving the fold, culminating in my voting for Reagan (there was a happy conservative) and becoming that dread thing: a neocon and a registered Republican. My friends and family don’t want to hear about my inexplicable conversion, and they don’t want me to send them links to blogs reflecting my views — I had recent relapse when I sent them David Mamet’s Village Voice article. So I read this and other blogs — plus the WSJ, NY Sun, and Commentary. (My NYT reading is limited to the sports section, obits, and their crossword puzzle — the NY Sun’s puzzles are more difficult.)
p.s. There are many more of us happy conservatives in NYC than is realized. I’m certain that’s true for New England and the West Coast.
grackle Says:
“One of the originators of this viewpoint was Thoreau. He opened up a can of worms that has since destructively tunneled into the psyche of the Left.”
Another part is that they simply think they are the underdog and that ‘the system’ is conservative.. ergo, they’re against everything… and also a little nutso for not seeing their side mostly runs the system…
I think contemporary liberalism is a rhetoric of feelings, and as Brooks notes, the current identity politics of the left is of the self-declared oppressed and down-trodden. How are you going to get feelings of happiness out of that?
To be oriented by feelings is to ultimately be self-referencing. You have access only to your own feelings, as opposed to a socially shared objective world. The self of feelings is not the self of the individuated person, but the self of the egocentric child. Add to that mix the rejection of the post moderns of objective rationality, and there is no escape; you are in the existentialist’s/absurdist’s “No Exit” trap, stuck in the gluey, sticky morass of affect. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, you must forever fall upon the thorns of life and bleed–in direct contrast with Brer Rabbit who was a happy conservative and at home in his world.
I’m pretty happy, myself. 😉
If you’re so happy, why the insatiable need to put liberals down?
I keep reading this blog hoping against hope that one day, the topic might turn to why conservatives are good, or what, within the conservative policy mix, works and what doesn’t, or doesn’t yet.
Instead, with the occassional diversion into food, or dance or music, we get a steady stream of “Why liberals are bad people.” A never-ending whine about how liberals control everything: academia, the media the courts and about how truly awful the half of Americans on the left are.
If you neocons are happy, you sure don’t know how to show it here.
It’s also telling that so many neocons buy right into the insipid notion that their emotional state validates their political views. That pretty much says it all about the state of American neoconservatism today.
“…They are more likely to be married, religious, and parents…”
I happen to be none of those three, but would still tend to agree that those of us on the conservative side are happier. I am.
Here’s why, Libtard. I don’t spend my life searching for someone to blame when things don’t go right for me. Generally, the reason is looking back at me from the mirror, and I’m comfortable enough with myself to accept that. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try that much harder the next time, however. Accepting responsibility for one’s own actions, for one’s own life, tends to be a pretty liberating experience, as well as a maturing one. Victims aren’t happy unless they’re wallowing in (self) pity, and I refuse to become a victim for any reason.
I’ve had all the material success someone of my middle middle-class and baccalaureate background could be expected to have, and I’ve exceeded that by a wide margin without becoming consumed by any overweening ambition. I’ve seen more of the world than most people, and have made friends with people from widely different cultures and backgrounds. I’ve never married, but don’t regret that aspect of my life. And I don’t put people down unless they do or say something to merit it, not just because they might have a different point of view.
My emotional state does not in any way validate my political views. I had pretty much the same views at those times in my life when things sucked big time. I knew things would get better, but they wouldn’t do so on their own, so I buckled down and did what I had to in order to climb out of whatever hole I had dug for myself. I didn’t go around looking for a government handout or to sue someone because I happened to fall on my face. Once I had emerged from the bad times, I found that achievement, real achievement, not “self-esteem” sans content, is also a major happiness builder. My happiness is also not contingent upon whoever wins the presidential race in November. Sure, I have my preference (can you guess?), but I’m not going lose any sleep if someone else wins. So yeah, I’m conservative, I’m happy, and I’m looking forward to the future.
I think part of it is a result of the difference in world view. Faced with a world they perceive as perfectable, and that isn’t perfect, liberals tend to be constantly in a state of tension. The conservative viewpoint–which sometimes does become complacency, not the same thing–allows for the fact that the world is going to present problems, some of them are intractable. and that’s simply part of life.
Libtard, you obviously didn’t read my first post. Being happy (or sad), is not characteristic of which side of the aisle someone may subscribe to. It has to do with accepting responsibility for one’s own place in life. Liberals have an uncanny talent for blaming everyone and anyone, but themselves, for their sad lives. Whereas, someone like myself, blames me, and only me, for why I might not be so happy. Liberals love to self-impose themselves as poor victims. To me, that’s nothing but pathetic.
Liberalism is a rejection of the reality of nature itself.
If you resent and reject the fact that life exists by seeking inequality over competitive life forms, chances are you’re miserable because the whole universe is against you.
El Rushbo’s noteable “Liberals want everyone to be equally unhappy” is indisputably true.
Niehbuhr’s Serenity Prayer is highly relevant to this thread. Liberals are patently not serene, never will be.
I’m a baby boomer who was much taken with the radical politics of the 60’s and the weirdness of the 70’s. As I look back at my friends and associates from the vantage point of fast-approaching senior citizenhood, I would say that the ones who worked hard, raised families, and lived in more or less traditional ways led richer and more productive lives, and they do tend to be happier now.
Abstract Recent research into population standards of life satisfaction has revealed a remarkable level of uniformity, with the mean values for Western populations clustering at around three-quarters of the measurement scale maximum. While this seems to suggest the presence of a homeostatic mechanism for life satisfaction, the character of such a hypothetical device is uncertain. This paper proposes that well-being homeostasis is controlled by positive cognitive biases pertaining to the self. Most particular in this regard are the positive biases in relation to self-esteem, control and optimism. Past controversies in relation to this proposition are reviewed and resolved in favour of the proposed mechanism. The empirical data to support this hypothesis are discussed in the context of perceived well-being as an adaptive human attribute.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/npdhla451ef7bql0/
I ran across an article citing a recently presented paper arguing the same thesis: that liberals are less happy than conservatives. The authors hypothesis was that the liberals lacked a filter that would allow them to rationalize inequality. To me, they seemed to be arguing that a belief in complete equality–economic as well as political–was a more normative state and more desirable as well. I thought that was a peculiar way of framing the observation. Let’s face it: scientists have a difficult time eliminating bias from their studies. Here is a link. Decide for yourselves. http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p204566_index.html
Libtard
To draw a distinction: some believe being liberal equates to being good. I do not believe being conservative equates to being good.
Being conservative equates to having an opinion about how things will best work out for everyone. Whether my opinions are right or wrong does not equate to my being either good or bad. This is why I’m willing to change my opinion: my opinion doesn’t define my nature. It is only my opinion, and only for this moment.
My nature, btw, is quite ungood! On a pretty consistent basis, I often know what is right, yet intentionally do wrong. Thgbthfft.
More Libtard
Yours is similar to my brother’s major complaint when I changed over to conservative views: “Why don’t you acknowledge that some liberal views are correct? Some liberal views must be correct, or else large numbers of people would not be liberal.”
Now, that last part is fallacious thinking. But, on the first part, I thought and thought about what liberal views I might agree with. The problem was I had come to look at the meaning and purpose of life in a different way than before. Once I made this change, all liberal policies were suddenly invalidated. Policies are premised upon different worldviews about how life works, and about life’s meaning and it’s purpose, and therefore about how best to love and to get along with our fellow man. My worldview had changed, and therefore everything had changed for me.
I did try being green, until it turned out anthropogenic global warming was a hoax.
I did support gay marriage. Then, in objecting to some blog commenters labeling anti gay marriage persons as homophobic, I began to research why people oppose gay marriage, and soon enough found that I also oppose gay marriage (on grounds that the state has an important and legally defendable interest in promoting traditional marriage [via providing special status for traditional marriage], and that special status for traditional marriage doesn’t violate the rights of gay persons).
After decades of observation I have concluded that the majority of liberals are more likely to display the behavior of the classic failure cycle where blaming others, self-doubt, less risk taking, and denial characterize their basic negative attitudes. This naturally leads to playing the game “ain’t it awful” consequently happiness is seldom achieved. Winning behaviors that include critical self-assessment and adjustment, self-reliance, and personal accountability that would breed good feeling about themselves is much more rare. Extremely socialistic societies have more dependent personal behavior and unhappiness than societies that value freedom and independence from intrusive government control.
“Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives,”
I would also suspect for those that believe in ghosts and are afraid of them, that ghosts have a greater psychological toll on them.
First the premise of the fear has to be examined, instead they called the outcome they don’t like “rationalization”.
They accept ideology as fact (not impiricism), and then try to use what ideology says is fact, to establish that these people are rationalizing.
The funny thing is that it’s a projection, since equality is an impossibility. Someone is born without a leg, now what? the whole thing is unequal again… and if you try to correct it, your not able to take an EQUAL share from everyone in the world for it so all you do is promote inequality.
In this way, they are worrying about a ghost… wahts worse is that their ways of fixing it is leads to more damage!
As an example we forget that the original purpose of minimum wage was to cause the unfit to not be able to earn the minimum and so they would not mate and procreate!
In other words, those under the minimum could not earn anything and so would deteriorate.
After all, a person working at 9.00 can live but if the minimum is 10, they are dead.
We forgot that because we decided that we would then support by theft those below it.
What these unthinking people are saying is that liberals are not happy because they don’t understand the world around them and their socialist ideology doesn’t let them as it informs them of things as true that are not (we are all actually equal, by focusing and rewarding on race we can get rid of race, that genetics doesn’t mean anything, there is no such thing as truth or impirical fact, etc)
Meanwhile, if you understand how things work, theya re not scary. If I understand that those who work harder make more, then I understand why some people have more. if I understand that working smart and taking advantage of random opportunity and skills, I can make more… this is less of a problem. if I understand that a person that can cure cancer will make a lot of money and that isnt bad, then I wont fret about it.
Contrary to popular believe, the world hasn’t ended because 1/10 of 1% have a lot more than most others. they are negligible.
But hey… if you believe the lies and false facts of ideology, it doesn’t help, it doesn’t inform, and you constantly see things contradict it… and since its focus is envy and guilt, how can someone be happy when that’s all they have?
Meanwhile, if they got together and made a company that made aproduct they could do what they want with the money and actually help people!!!!!!! not create these waste of capital that help few, and do better the worse they are!!!
by the way, this isnt the only article.. i was quoting this one.. sorry.
Conservatives Happier Than Liberals
http://www.livescience.com/health/080507-liberal-conservative.html
Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.
Busting Myth, People Turn More Liberal With Age
http://www.livescience.com/health/080310-liberal-seniors.html
and articles and studies like above, are horrible..
these are cargo cult science. they put together all the trappings so that it LOOKS like sciecne, and then other people use that in their argbuments
like the study that says women earn 70cents on the dollar men earn…
that number is false… the woman that first wrote it admitted that it was eroneous… but its still pulled out constantly..
or like the crap that comes out before mothers day.
a mother does 117k a work a year… etc.
but no one mentions that if that is so, and mom works a 40k job, and pays minimum wage to take care of her kids, then isnt she cheating the children out of 60k of life?
its a ridiculous thing because there isnt one person in teh world who would pay 115k to have someone raise their kids for them…
right now, they pay less than minimum wage for that.
so what is the real salary? she is worth less than minimum wage on the open market.
why?
because thats all she would pay someone else to do her job.
the whole thing is a fake game to make women important… deny fatehrs any importance. and to make teh salaries of the watchers working on state dole be valued higher.
its a farce…
oh… and the studies for DV are also skewed… all the REAL studies show that women are as violent to their partner, and often more so. (confirming erin pizzeys points. erin was the woman who opened up the first dv shelter and she was chased out because she wanted to help men and women and she recognized that a major proportion of the women that came to her were as violent or more so than their partners making the fighting worse)
but hey.. i can give you the title of a nursing manual used in med schools, and the whole book is about domestic violence… odd thing is that ALL violence is from the man to the woman, the man to the child and the man to the elderly…
not ONE sentence in the whole manual with orders to call police on flimsey stuff and instrutions to ignore what patients say and make up things and call… its horrible.
sigh.
Libtard:
no one here says liberals “are bad people” we say liberals are people who follow bad ideas. there is a difference.
It’s also telling that so many neocons buy right into the insipid notion that their emotional state validates their political views. That pretty much says it all about the state of American neoconservatism today.
we also point out that liberals have it backwards. like above.
our emotional state does not validate anything.
you read it backwards again…
our meritocratic and impiracist ways give us a bette understanding of cause an effect and makes us more effective in the world. those who are more effective dont search for a bogey man to blame for why they didnt get up off their asses and work.
you miss the point that a person who believes that there is a demon in a room, is not going to go into it. does not matter if the demon or the room is not real, they will act that way.
you mis the point that a peron who is told the game is fixed, rebels against the game without even playing it, becvause they will waste their time.
they create a self fulfiling prophecy where they dont do anything and keep asserting that if the game was fair they would do well.. however they are not even in the race… they have not even tested if the game is fair or foul… they have been told that its unfair, and accepted that, adn now seek to turn all belongings over to totalitarians cause the totalitarians said, we are mroe fair.
they dont understand that for every job in state, the population has to earn enough profit for the job they do, and the ghost job they pay for in state. state makes no profit, so state is a drain. this is unlike the same exact job in private which makes money, pays for itself and contributes.
if lefitists were smart, they would go out and try to earn millions. a leftist that earns millions gives 100k plus to state in taxes. they create jobs and can hire who they want (or used to till they changed it)…
100 liberals who worked hard could contribute 10 million towards the state…
they could then take another pooled 10 million buy medicine, charter a ship, and ship to the needy,.
they can adopt the homless.
but they dont.. they yell to someone else to do that… and do nthing much themselves… and thats because they want to be the poor parasite who gets the freebie… or else they would work at it.
the problem is that they dont kwno what they have here. the joke is that the poor know better than them. all around the world, evryone runs to the country that is the worst… right?
how many people break into russia illegally every year? how many break into china illegally every year….
you would think the poor were the stupidest masochists… but they are not.
i came from poor… illiterate imimigrants.. who were white..
my wife came from poor chinese…
the problem with the liberals, is that they want what others have and they dont want to work for it since its easier and more fun to be a public nuisance, a terrorist, a brown shirter, becfause they have no life, no meaning in their lives other than the cause.
they dont even know why.
but the conservatives knwo thei history.. history is not fake facts made up… at least non leftist isnt made up. and the world is real.. and there is good and bad… and truth does exist.
the left makes facts up since theybelieve that there is no such thing as good and eveil or even such a thing as truth.
they are not ancorhed and they are drifting all over and they are not happy..
they have been purposefully made not to be… how else do you get footsoldiers in the war to destroy capitalism and live a life of equal subsistence to everyone else except the siloviki or their equivalents.
we are not really knocking liberals as muich as we are knocking the false history, facts, and arbuments they make.
i can prove it too…
tell me if McCarthy was truthful, or a liar. tell me if it was a scare, or valid. then tell me how you know.
i already know what you will say… because the left is like an army of parrots.
Since accepting responsibility makes conservatives happier, here’s some tips to carry you on the path toward bliss:
Stop blaming the “liberal” media. Even if the media were biased in the way many conservatives claim it is, wouldn’t that be the conservatives’ own fault?
Look in the mirror, indeed. If arch-conservative Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are second- and third-rate, how is that the fault of liberals? If right-wing billionaire cult leader Sun Young Moon can’t attract readers to his heavily subsidized metropolitan dailies like The Washington Times, why is liberals’ fault?
The question isn’t so much why conservatives fail to produce a news media they can believe in, but why they fail to acknowledge this as a failure. Instead, they simply blame liberals as if that justifies the unpopularity of their views.
Exactly the same goes for all the whining about academia. If conservatives aren’t making the grade at universities, why is that liberals’ fault? It’s a free country with a very wide array of universities, include very many that are openly committed to conservative causes. Trouble is, those universities just don’t produce as many scholars and scholarship as do non-ideologically defined institutions, which conservatives brand as “liberal.”
Then there’s foreign policy. Consider the war in Iraq.
Who’s to blame for the failure there? Show me one neocon that’s ever acknowledged that virtually all their plans and predictions for Iraq have been demonstrated to be wrong. Instead, they blame the press and liberals.
Take responsibility? Hardly. The core of neocon philosophy is to blame liberals or uppity foreigners for every single problem known to mankind.
Libtard Says:
“If you’re so happy, why the insatiable need to put liberals down?”
You won’t leave us alone.
Dan Says:
“To me, they seemed to be arguing that a belief in complete equality—economic as well as political—was a more normative state and more desirable as well.”
Ding ding… which would really suck if you were the best at what you did (re: and forced to earn the same as the slackers)…
Forced equality is just another tyranny
Example… want better teachers? Get ride of union scale pay rates.
The question isn’t so much why conservatives fail to produce a news media they can believe in, but why they fail to acknowledge this as a failure. Instead, they simply blame liberals as if that justifies the unpopularity of their views.
Fox News isn’t unpopular. Why should conservatives blame Keith Olberman for whatever problems you accuse Bill O’Reilly of having?
Stop blaming the “liberal” media.
We’ll stop blaming the main sewer media when the media accepts personal responsibility for the genocide, mass murder, and just total breakdown in civilization that their stories have helped create.
Oh, Amanda, Amanda. Where to start? First of all, I don’t recall hearing any conservative–neo or not–blaming the press or liberals for AQ or JAM attacks, spiriting away WMD before 2003, or Iraqi political deadlock. What we object to is the complete focus on failure without an acknowledgement of improvements when the do occur (or if they are noted, it’s in Section C, page 23 below the fold, while failures get 72pt. headlines), and the constant moving of the goalposts. When adjustments are made to correct for failures, the left and the press (NYT, raise your hand) say it doesn’t count anymore. We also object, in the most strenuous manner, to the left and the media treating the U.S. military as the enemy and trumpeting alleged abuses by it as fact before investigations are complete while ignoring far worse abuses by AQ and other Islamist terror groups. Can you explain this, Amanda? I’d be very interested in your answer. Also, we’ve had several Medal of Honor winners since the war began in 2001 against AQ and the Taliban. Can you name any of them? That’s our nation’s highest award, but major newspapers rarely cover the presentations, or give any column inches to reporting on the winners (all posthumous, up until now), but events like Abu Ghraib and the (non-)flushing of the Quran at Gitmo are repeated ad infinitum ad nauseam. Why is that?
The press and liberals also have an obsession, for lack of a better term, with rehashing over and over again how we got into Iraq in the first place, instead of accepting the fact that we’re there, so’s AQ (which is our sworn enemy, whether the left wants to admit it or not), and we have to make the best of the situation. Foreign policy is an inexact art (God knows it was during the Clinton administration–Balkans, Rwanda, Somalia, Haiti as a sample), but the left is more interested in conducting investigations into what went wrong instead of trying to get things right. In other words, it’s the same attempted criminalization of foreign policy disputes by the left that has been occurring since at least the Boland Amendment became law.
Regarding academia, you’re on very weak ground here. Nobody is arguing that conservatives aren’t “making the grade”, as you call it. Conservatives do make the grade, in Business, Engineering, and hard science faculties. (There’s that real world thing again). There, if you come up with a new idea, it’s pretty easy to test if it’s a harebrained scheme or the next iPod. Did the marketing plan result in increased sales or not? Did the bridge fall down? Did the molecules bond or not? In the humanities, however, they’re not being allowed to try. How many left-wing speakers are shouted down, “pied”, have demonstrations organized against them, or are otherwise prevented from presenting their views? I challenge you to name one. Just one. On the other hand, speakers like Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, and Dinesh D’Souza (there’s a bit of alliteration for you, Neo:-), among many others, have been subjected to various forms of attack that go far beyond simple disagreement with their views.
Following the campus upheavals in the 1960s, many of the former left-wing campus activists decided to pursue advanced degrees, even after the draft was abolished and the need for them to hide from the military press gangs had ended (that’s sarcasm, btw). After their studies, with degrees in esoteric fields that did absolutely nothing to provide them with useful skills that would improve their chances of finding a job in the corporate world that they professed to hate, becoming an adjunct assistant professor of English with a specialization in early New England lesbian poetry was their only alternative to starvation. Now, after 30 or more years, they are full professors, Department Chairs, and Deans. But their views from within their little bubbles are mired in 1968. So it’s hardly surprising that conservatives, from students to prospective faculty members, find it tough going when the university heavyweights are often stacked against them.
Regarding “conservative” academia, most of these institutions are private, and usually have a religious affiliation, with the same affiliation either required or at least encouraged by the administration for teaching staff. As private organizations, that is their right, but it has the effect of limiting the employment pool. Most importantly, their endowments are usually much smaller than those of the larger private institutions like Harvard and Duke, and that naturally limits the depth and scope of research that can be supported, and the potential impact of that research. Money still talks.
Regarding the Washington Times, I’ve never head anyone blame liberals that it doesn’t sell. The Times competes head-to-head with the Post in a predominantly liberal market, so why should it be surprising that the Post far outsells the Times? If you have something that people in a particular area like better, guess what? It’ll sell better. That’s market economics, pure and simple.
I’m not sure I understand your complaint about Rupert Murdoch. You’re the one who’s saying his newspapers are second and third-rate. If you don’t like them, don’t buy them. In his native Australia, his Newscorp controls almost 75% of the daily newspaper circulation countrywide, so he must be doing something right. BTW, Amanda, did you know that “arch-conservative” Murdoch used to be a staunch Australian Labor Party supporter? It’s true. Like our bloghostess Neo, seems he had his own change of heart a while back.
I’m also curious as to why you think that if the media has a liberal bias, that is somehow the conseratives’ fault. Sounds like the Wahhabi view of rape, where no matter what the man does, it’s somehow the woman’s fault.
I guess that about does it for now. I’ll be happy to eat more of Neo’s bandwidth if you have any more comments on how we evil conservatives are just incurable whiners over all things liberal. Have a nice day.
I’m a conservative and with all that is happening in the world today, I am always happy simply because I choose to be that way. I don’t like everything that is going on in the world, but I feel very fortunate to live in a free country.
To be a left-liberal today is to be the very caricature of an ungrateful, petulant, spoiled heir to an enormous inheritance. It is to be in all-pervasive discontent with a civilization and economic-political system that has freed billions from unimaginable oppression, that has prospered billions with inconceivable wealth, health, leisure and opportunity. But as PJ O’Rourke said, “… liberals aren’t very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent – not to say toddlerlike – idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums.” I would add, with their religious zeal, and to tear down the building because of a leaky faucet.
Preceding Thoreau, Rousseau, a miserable enough person, was the real originator of leftardism, with his bloody disciple Robespierre. It was his ideas that separated the French Assembly into left and right, that rejected the Enlightenment ideas of Locke, Burke, Montesquieu, et al. Rousseau rejected personal responability and “the Biblical view” as Alan Bloom put it, and opted to blame society. Out of that sewer flowed every fanatical, self-righteous scheme to right the world with utopian, statist, romanticist fantasies, and hence the blood of every victim from Robespierre’s French Terror, to the Communist holocaust, to fascist genocide.
To be a libtard is to hate every fundamental principle of western culture, especially that of personal responsability. One anecdote points to the major difference and the cause of the intrinsic bitterness of the libtard. The London Times once asked a number prominent people to write essays on the topic, “What s Wrong with the World. Erudites and scholars such as HG Wells, waxed prolific in exlanations and theories. G. K. Chesterton’s reply is the shortest and most to the point in history:
Dear Sirs:
I am.
Sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON
“Oh, Amanda, Amanda. Where to start? First of all, I don’t recall hearing any conservative—neo or not—blaming the press or liberals for AQ or JAM attacks, spiriting away WMD before 2003,”
No one “spirited away” WMDs before 2003. They were gone in 1991, something else the neocons were proven wrong about.
“What we object to is the complete focus on failure without an acknowledgement of improvements when the do occur (or if they are noted, it’s in Section C, page 23 below the fold, while failures get 72pt. headlines), and the constant moving of the goalposts.
”
Yawn. The moving of the goalposts has occurred on your side of the fence, where each discredited and discarded rationale for continuing this war is replaced with another in rapid succession. Bush and Co didn’t need the media’s help to create a failure in Iraq; their own incompetence and lack of foresight did that on their own. If you think otherwise, try providing evidence instead of just blustering rant.
“The press and liberals also have an obsession, for lack of a better term, with rehashing over and over again how we got into Iraq in the first place, instead of accepting the fact that we’re there, so’s AQ (which is our sworn enemy, whether the left wants to admit it or not), and we have to make the best of the situation.”
The media has every right to focus on how we ended up in Iraq in the first place. Aside from the fact that most of the key foul-ups were made in the opening months of the occupation and have snowballed downhill since then, the false pretenses under which this war was started undermine our right to perpetuate it at all, though its die-hard supporters don’t want to admit it.
Oh, and “al-Qaeda” in Iraq is just a red herring being thrown out by the neocons. It is not what the name suggests and has been marginalized to the point of near-irrelevance now.
“On the other hand, speakers like Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, and Dinesh D’Souza (there’s a bit of alliteration for you, Neo:-), among many others, have been subjected to various forms of attack that go far beyond simple disagreement with their views.”
I don’t see you complaining when your fellow commentators, like the childish buffoons that they are, label everyone with a dissenting opinion, including the person you’re responding to, a “libtard”.
Oh, but of course, I keep forgetting – that’s only unacceptable when the left does it. Glass houses and such.
The best part about your post is that, despite its long-winded and self-satisfied nature, it doesn’t make any effort to actually refute what Amanda said, which is that the self-proclaimed patriots who are constantly demonizing the left for lacking personal responsibility cannot themselves refrain from opening their mouths without bitching about some left-wing conspiracy (the “libtards”, whose only qualification is disagreeing with misguided rhetoric) and how the media ruins everything for them, without lending credence to the possibility that they might actually have it wrong.
Your response, which you tout off as some kind of Herculean smackdown, is just more of the same bitching, moaning and excuse-making that Amanda described, with no real refutation of her original point. Not to mention an allusion to some bullshit fantasy about the WMD lie that you and others bought from Bush, and you apparently are still deluding yourself over rather than admitting an error like a grown-up would do.
I am a conservative but i DONT LIKE MY WIFES DOG. Now I am unhappy, I am going now to eat lots of meat and clean a gun and run my lawnmower just for fun.
I recycle.
Revisiting a “dead” thread is instructive… I’d love to hear from Amanda and warrior-poet (if they’re not the same person) today on the subject of Iraq, when even mainstream left-leaning media are forced to admit that things are going in a very positive direction there.