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Originally Posted by Lupus
(Post 13227100)
Most of this has to do with "road to get there" actions than "destination" ones.
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Sure. I was poking at some of the main factors for what happened to the Republican Party and why it's not currently a conservative party that would be a positive force for the nation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lupus
(Post 13227100)
With Trump he's self-funded
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He claimed to be such for the 2016 primaries. Not so much for after that. To be clear, though, I wasn't referring to Trump specifically in that. While Trump has been an important influence on the Republican Party for the past four years, I was referring to a number of much more long-lasting influences that are major reasons for why Trump even could rise to power as he has.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lupus
(Post 13227100)
so you can't say he's being controlled by rich Libertarians and corporatists.
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Actually... as long as what Fox News pushes is being heavily influenced by the propaganda that those rich Libertarians and corporatists have created, that's pretty close to controlling his actions. Trump's quite amply demonstrated that Fox can fairly easily get him to change course on numerous occasions. That's even without the money part of things.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lupus
(Post 13227100)
Who knows though what the future of the party holds once he isn't president.
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We can certainly hope that things get better, though simple hope won't be enough to undo the long-term damage or do much to change the underlying drivers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lupus
(Post 13227100)
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008...pers/#fn-718-2
It's quite old now. An important sentence is
"In other words, if one were to compare a theoretical Republican and a theoretical Democrat who had the identical age, ethnicity, race, gender, income, marital status and education level, the Republican would be 13% more likely than the Democrat to be very happy."
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First, thank you for showing what you were thinking of. It's not especially relevant to what had been raised, but its an interesting topic in and of itself. After reviewing the link, I think that that sentence is a useful one, but to be taken with a grain of salt. Right after it, for example, it added a couple factors to the mix, church attendance and health status, that reduced that margin to 7%. Go a bit later on, and "It may be that one of the key factors that explain the Republican happiness edge is no more complicated than this: Republicans have fewer financial woes than Democrats." is another sentence of note. Follow that with - "One obvious limitation of the Pew surveys discussed in this report is that they did not explore respondents’ psychological characteristics,which surely have something to say about whether a given individual is happy or not." There certainly does seem to be a gap, yes, though.
Studies have progressed since then as well, though. On that general topic, it's likely worth also considering some more recent studies of relevance like this one -
Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness. For a bit of a summation of some of it,
here's another link. To poke at some of the gist of parts not directly covered by the headline,
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In line with previous studies, the researchers found "increasing political conservatism predicted greater reported life satisfaction." However, they “also found that self-deceptive enhancement was higher among conservatives than liberals."
Liberals, in other words, were more self-aware, meaning that when they declared they were happy, it was more likely to be genuinely true.
The researchers caution that "it would be a mistake to infer from our data that liberals are 'objectively' happier than conservatives." They note that there is some evidence suggesting that convincing yourself of your own happiness can prove advantageous in both work settings and personal relationships. Plastered-on smiles have their place.
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Again, not especially relevant to how easily emotionally triggered and influenced one is by fear and anxiety, but an interesting topic itself.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lupus
(Post 13227100)
It's true though that the democratic party was the choice of the KKK and the leaders supported segregation and blacks having less civil rights for the longest time until the 60s.
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Indeed. However, there's been quite the political realignment since then, given the Civil Rights movement and the Southern Strategy in particular, before getting to all the rest. Using the Civil War and the origins of the KKK as condemnations of the
current Democratic Party is... to be kind, not even remotely a sign of being either informed or intelligent. Which is a bit maddening when a person is otherwise an intelligent person.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lupus
(Post 13227100)
Perhaps he meant illegal immigrants?
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Sadly, no.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lupus
(Post 13227100)
Then they are breaking the law by definition.
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While that may be technically true, albeit naught but worthy of an eyeroll when, for example, a family crosses the border and immediately turns themselves in to seek asylum under the relevant treaty (especially when they had been unlawfully prevented from seeking asylum otherwise - which the Trump Administration has worked hard to do), he wasn't particularly talking about that. The general thrust was more towards violent crimes and, for example, how refugees weren't really integrating with the larger American society (which is true for some of them, but... personally, I find it hard to blame a number of those for whom that's the case for a number of reasons).
What I was more directly referring to, though, was that after I cited a fact that he didn't believe, we made an agreement to verify whether it was true or not, because facts do matter. He had the opportunity to check first and came back with quite the tale. By his own telling (only barely altered for objectivity), he found lots of fact-checkers that verified what I said to be true, but those were just fact-checkers and could be ignored. So, he scrounged around in the statistics, located one that was completely irrelevant to the agreement (and not at all as indicative as he wanted it to be) and then declared that that statistic proved that he was right. He thoroughly violated both the letter and spirit of our agreement over something that *should* have been a side-note, at best. At that point, he quite obviously had ingrained emotional triggers on the subject, to wrap it around a bit. Triggers that were almost certainly put there by Fox and right-wing media.
