Posted on 04/03/2012 1:15:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
Don't get me wrong. Not every conservative has a winning personality and not every liberal is a toothache in search of a mouth to inhabit. In fact, one of the single nicest people I know is a liberal (Hi, Julie Joyce!) Yet and still, it's not a reach to say that most liberals, especially the ones that are politically active, are just generally difficult to get along with.
It's not just me saying that either. I've interviewed more than one big name conservative who has told me that they moved over to the right in large part because the other liberals they were around were such insufferable human beings.
John Hawkins: ...I always find the stories of people who ideologically move from the left to the right to be fascinating and I noticed that you used to be a liberal who even worked for Ron Dellums...
Michael Medved: Ron Dellums helped to make me a conservative.
John Hawkins: How so? What caused you to move to the right?
Michael Medved: First of all, even at the time I went to work for Dellums, I knew better. Because I was never that far out. I mean I supported Robert Kennedy, not Eugene McCarthy.
John Hawkins: Dellums was even a Communist, wasn't he?
Michael Medved: Yeah, he basically was. I worked for Dellums for 6 weeks and then I couldn't stand it anymore. Because I think he so clearly demonstrated some of the most malign and malevolent tendencies of the American Left. Corruption, drug use, Communist sympathies if not Communist party membership.
John Hawkins: A related question, I guess you would have been pretty surprised when you said in the book that while Christians "hold religious beliefs against homosexuality," they are some of the most tolerant, understanding, and kind people I have ever met. So was that a big surprise for you when you weren't getting condemned?
Tammy Bruce: Yes, it was; it was shocking. For me it was quite life-changing in my sense of how I viewed the world and I was also, when it comes to my view of Christians, quite surprised by how happy they were. I mean, I remember being on the left; no one is happy, trust me. They (are the) biggest group of miserable people you would ever want to meet. Everything is wrong, everything is going bad, everyone is after you, everyone wants to get you, people are building camps.
To speak with finally, on talk radio, with Christians, I was struck first by the genuine happiness from these people and also the fact that even though they disagreed with me, finally I was having conversations with people who were curious, disagreed with me, but didn't want to hurt me, were interested in persuading me, and it was quite a revelation, I have to say. I owe my beginning in talk radio to that kind of --- it's the only place really where you can have that kind of exchange between someone like myself and conservative Christians and have it be safe and have it be really life-transforming.
Why are liberals so unpleasant to be around?
1) They're unhappy: Study after study shows that conservatives are happier people than liberals. The difference can be staggering.
In 2004, people who said they were conservative or very conservative were nearly twice as likely to say they were very happy as people who called themselves liberal or very liberal (44 percent versus 25 percent). Conservatives were only half as likely to say they were not too happy (9 versus 18 percent).
Unhappy people are generally disagreeable because when you're miserable, you tend to become very selfish. If you want an example of how that works, go hit yourself on the hand with a hammer and while you're writhing in agony, see how much time you spend thinking about helping other people as opposed to wishing you hadn't smashed your own hand.
2) Liberals don't care as much about tradition: Although it goes without saying that people who worship change for change's sake don't care very much about customs, you might wonder why that would make such a big difference. Well, as Thomas Sowell has noted, "Civilization has been aptly called a 'thin crust over a volcano.' The anointed are constantly picking at that crust."
In many cases, societal conventions represent the accumulated wisdom of previous generations. Through trial and error, they discovered that there are certain things you can do that help keep a society running well. There are reasons why people get together and sing Christmas carols in the town square, refuse to insult people immediately after they die, treat marriage as sacred, and don't turn funerals into campaign rallies. Because liberals tend to think they're smarter than all those old dead people simply by virtue of being liberal, they tend to ignore those conventions and create disorder and havoc around themselves in the process.
3) Liberals see people who disagree as evil: Liberals see themselves as part of a Manichean struggle in which they’re trying to create Utopia on earth while they’re being opposed by people who want to do evil for evil’s sake. In other words, liberals are about as complex as your average comic book from the fifties. As Charles Krauthammer has said,
To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
When you attribute disagreements with Barack Obama to racism, opposition to gay marriage to homophobia, standing against abortion as hatred of women, and a desire to balance the budget to loathing of the poor, you have a hopelessly simplistic view of the world that makes you utterly impervious to reason. Stupid, you may be able to educate, but evil, you have to defeat -- and liberals are seldom picky about the means or the manners they use while trying to do so.
4) Liberals aren't very religious: Liberals are overwhelmingly either atheists or agnostics, people who don't take their religious beliefs very seriously in the first place, or people who allow their ideology to completely subvert their religious beliefs. This is no small matter because religion is one of the great civilizing forces. That's not to say that even sincere practitioners of a religion always do the right thing because as Rick Warren has noted, "The church is a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints." However, if you take human beings with open minds, put them in a pew and expose them to "Love thy neighbour as thyself" and "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" long enough, it will curb their nature and make them into much better people than they otherwise would have been.
5) Liberalism encourages arrogance: Liberals tend to believe they're brilliant, compassionate, moral, enlightened, perceptive, and courageous, not because of anything they've actually done, but just because they're liberal. When you completely divorce a person's self image from his behavior, it produces terrible results -- like liberals who hurl abuse at conservative women while believing that they're feminists or selfish left-wingers who've never given a dime to charity, but believe themselves to be much more compassionate than people who tithe 10% of their income.
Now, on some level, liberals know this is all a big sham. But, even that can be problematic because unstable high self-esteem actually causes more bad behavior and violent behavior than low self-esteem. As Roy Baumeister noted in Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty,
The sequence goes something like this. Someone tells you that you are not very competent at something. If you are a shame-prone person, you start to experience that sinking feeling that the other person may be right and this is not the only thing that you are bad at, and maybe you are just a worthless loser in general. You start to feel panic, anxiety, and misery, and your heart beats faster. To break free of those feelings, you reject the premise. You are not incompetent in the way the other person said. The other person had no right to say that to you, and he's completely wrong. Your feelings are now directed outward at him, instead of yourself, and the effects of your faster heartbeat and general arousal transfer into intense anger at the person who has so unfairly insulted you. You want to hit him.
Congratulations! You've just graduated from "Interactions with Liberals 101."
I think liberals believe deep down that they’re never supposed to feel all the negative emotions that come with being human. They can’t stand to feel shame and fear particularly. They think themselves above such emotions and either ignore them or overcompensate for them. They become narcissistic as a result.
"Not suppose to"? Perhaps. But I think you're being too kind. I think they flat-out reject them. Liberals are having a two year old's temper tantrum against the difficulties of accepting personal responsibility for their own lives that they never get out of, because they are rewarded for indulging that narcissism by Leftists who demand obedience and votes for protecting it.
I recall hearing a short teaching in Buddhism similar to that. It goes something like; you shouldn't do things like wear your shoes on your head or casually throw your clothes on the floor because acting in a disordered way like that causes confusion in others.
What many people don't understand, and liberals almost militantly deny, is that people are not all equal mentally and emotionally. Some are quite strong-willed and/or brilliant while others are very fragile and/or stupid. And all ranges in between as well of course. When you act in a crazy or careless manner just for fun or out of apathy towards your own actions you do great harm to those who don't have the capacity to understand.
Tradition, order and mindfulness are very valuable and stabilizing qualities that go much further than simply being useful to the person who practices them.
Honoring one's parents and ancestors is important for those reasons among others. All of the knowledge that now exists among us is an accumulation of knowledge from those who have come before us. They paid a price for many of the things they learned that we now take for granted.
Liberals are driven by jealousy and laziness.
I am amazed at the sheer number of lefties on sickness benefits,yet,can still go out and party.
The lefties resent you having your own business and owning your home.
The liberals can´t think for themselves, they need NANNY to dictate their every moves.
Liberal can´t cope with you having your own views, they will label you as soon as they think you are anti-gay, anti-islam and so on.
Liberals will side with the ennemy of their country.
Soon in my country ,France, will shall have elections, sadly,it seems we will end up with liberals in power. Not that in France or the rest of Europe there is a divide between left and right anymore.
Well, it isn't hard to prove that liberals are stupid. Each and every day they volunteer a new example.
Many libs are atheists and dislike or hate their own country as well. So they feel unrooted and not part of the country. Strangers in their own land...unless they live in California or other centers of liberalism. Groupthink is popular with libs in these places, and it's easier to shut off outside influences i.e. conservatism. Inside the lib conclaves they can practice group hate directed at evil conservatives. Since conservatives on average are happier with their lives and love their country and therefore don't see the need to protest everything, they're natural targets of libs who are far unhappier and need a villain or villains to give their lives meaning.
Bump for later
3) Liberals see people who disagree as evil:
Before I left Minnestoopid to return to Texas, I had one “blind date” with a schoolteacher. She found out that one of the major clients of my business was Flint Hills Resources. Yeah, the eeeeeevvvilllll Koch Brothers! I quickly became evil incarnate and in league with the devil.
Chicks dig bad boys and liberal chicks are easy. So, ah, didja, you know?
Funny, but back in the day, I came to the same conclusion as P.J. O'Rouke, that a lot of guys affect liberal attitudes 'cause liberal chicks are easy. I just never went as far as him.
Bump for later...
Most liberals have arrived at being liberal not through reason (e.g. “Having studied the principles of liberalism and conservativism,and having compared the two, I find liberalism to be superior.”) but through emotion (e.g. “I feel that we should do something about this problem.”). As a consequence they are unable to rationally defend their positions . . . because they weren’t reached through reason to begin with. They never permit their “faith” to be challenged. Instead they attack the challenger. Most aren’t equipped to offer a reasoned argument in defense of their liberalism.
First of all, the word “liberal” belongs in scare quotes. Because before 1920, the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals. Liberals who believe in progress of by and for the people, not progress for any Establishment.But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary).
The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us. And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation - we know that just as surely as we know that every American marketer loves to boldly proclaim that whatever product he is flogging is New!
Clearly, the meaning of a political term of such long standing as “liberal” was (indeed, is outside the US) could not have been inverted within a single decade without the cooperation of journalism. And it could not have happened if journalism were not monolithic in its determination to institute Newspeak.It seems outlandish to claim that journalism is a single institution and that the New York Times and the New York Post and Newsday are not competing businesses. Well, those institutions do compete - but then, so do the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. But off the field, within the business of Major League Baseball, the Yankees and the Red Sox are partners. They hire umpires together, and they promote the idea that MLB games actually matter, together. Likewise all the big names in journalism belong to a single institution, and that has been the case for over a century and a half.
Before the advent of the telegraph, newspapers were fractiously independent of each other, and were as much about the opinion of their printer as anything else. Where there were competing newspapers, you picked your paper according to the congeniality of it’s printer’s opinions with your own perspective. The sources of material for news came by mail - people who traveled abroad might go to a printer and seek to be hired to write about the locales they were going to - thus becoming “correspondents.” And the federal government subsidized mail of newspapers from one town to another. Otherwise, newspapers didn’t have much news that, in principle at least, was not available to the general public as fast as the printer would be likely to get to print with it. Especially considering that few newspapers were dailies in those days.
That changed, relatively suddenly, with the advent of the telegraph. Telegraphy bandwidth was scarce and expensive, and so it was natural for it to be shared among newspapers in association. Thus, the Associated Press - initially the New York Associated Press, founded in 1848. The association of all the major newspapers into one organization did not go unnoticed, and the question of concentration of information control was raised. The AP responded to that issue by noting that the newspapers were still fractiously independent, so the AP itself was - wait for it - “objective.” Whatever merit that argument might have seemed to have in the early days, the association of the newspapers opened to all the writers for the various papers the possibility of having their stories printed not just in their own paper but nationwide. To meet that objective, writers write the way the AP wants stories written.
The AP has an official “Style Guide.” But it is not mere appearances which are controlled by the AP.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam SmithJournalists have always wanted to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” In other words, journalists want power. Power, to the journalist, is the ability to criticize the people who make things work, and have that criticism accepted and responded to. And that implies a desire by journalists to have the government, which journalists expect to be responsive to public opinion which journalists expect to be able to control, discipline business and the police and the military according to its dictates. So long as journalism is unified, that objective is only too realistic.The problem that creates and exacerbates is the one which Theodore Roosevelt critiqued in his famous 1910 speech at the Sorbonne:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.:The Associated Press represents the hypertrophied state of journalism, in which criticism is given pride of place over actual performance in working to a bottom line. It is also vulnerable to legal attack. It was held to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act back in 1945 - when the mission of transmitting the news over scarce bandwidth still seemed to make it too big to fail. With the advent of modern laser/fiber optic communication and satellite communication technology, communications bandwidth is (as the proponents of nuclear power overpromised for electricity back in the same era) “too cheap to meter.” Which is why we have the Internet as we know it. And why the AP could disappear without a trace, and why I hope that it gets sued every time a George Zimmerman gets tried by United Journalism’s kangaroo court (note that the fact that Zimmerman has been libeled is independent of any determination that he might in fact be culpable in the death of Travon Martin. Even felons have some rights).In reality George Zimmerman as an individual isn’t even the target. Because Trayvon Martin was never of any consequence nationally, and isn’t now except as a symbol; he could have been murdered by another black like so many are, and would have been memorialized by no reporter and no politician. It is the American middle class which is the actual target. It is the rule of law which is the target of “liberalism.” No wonder “liberals” are unpleasant.
HATTIESBURG -- Investigators said Monday night they still were piecing together what motivated a man to open fire at a Hattiesburg restaurant on Monday afternoon, wounding five customers and employees. 
But while Tyner called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and decried tax policies that favored the rich, he also opposed amnesty policies for illegal immigrants. 
While he said he’s seen police come to Cucos twice before in his five years at Payless, he said he never expected to see the business next door crawling with police and ambulances. 
The author lost his credibility when he quoted Rick Warren.
They obsessively cram liberal newspapers, tv news, etc into their heads and when the fantasy world is threatened they lash out.
The smarter ones eventually recognize this and grow up. Many never do.
bfl...
There are no smart liberals. They are all dumb and ignorant
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