Re: #29:

“No, Metro, I objected to your description of the comment section as conservative. While I haven’t asked my commenters to identify their political affiliations, I gather from observation that many of my regular commenters — the American ones, anyway — would identify themselves as Democrats.”

Robert, you can’t be serious. The majority of your regular commenters seem pretty conservative to me. True, the commenting section has moved away from the extreme right in the past couple of years and clearly left-leaning comments no longer get gang-raped, but it’s still clearly right of center.

Conservatives dont rationalize inequality away, they just dont care.

Equality takes on a different meaning with vastly different consequences for conservatives and leftists, particularly in options vs. outcomes. Probably responsibilities vs. rights fall within the same category. Both sides have problems, but equal outcomes is fatally flawed; people have different skills, motivations, intelligence, etc. that lead them to different occupations, spouses, lifestyles and so on. What you do with it is your choice and the result is your responsibility. That tends to make leftists extremely uncomfortable.

So there are competing approaches on how to carry out some of the same policy goals. But to say conservatives lack in empathy is burying your head in the sand. Deeply.

Only if you believe that the difference between someone who lives on $1 a day and someone who lives on $1,000 a day is the correct result of a meritocracy, only then can you believe that Cafferty turd. To try and explain away others’ real suffering as mere pseudo-intellectual whining is just another means of avoidance.

http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn......-liberals/

For example, a conservative might support the idea of a meritocracy – that if you work hard and perform well, you’ll move up the economic ladder… and if you don’t, you probably won’t. But the study shows liberals tend to be troubled by this. Inequalities take a greater psychological toll on liberals, apparently because they can’t rationalize away the gaps in society and thus end up more frustrated by them.

That’s a large part of what the study is actually getting at, which deflates a lot of the pseudo-intellectual types (the world is so unfair… blame it on society?).

So it’s self-evident. Southern US pro-slavery folks were happier than abolitionists before the Civil War. If you lived in Nazi Germany, you were probably happier as a Jew-hating Nazi than as a Jew-loving democrat.

As the article notes, conservatives tend to believe that vast inequality is justified and/or necessary. Progressives (even pro-market ones like me) know that there isn’t any justification for other people’s suffering, none other than our own small-minded selfishness and lack of imagination. Progressives tend to view the improvement of civilization as an increase in overall empathy and compassion in addition to material advances. E.M. Forster called it the spread of tenderness. In fact progressives are prone to believe that without increasing empathy we will destroy ourselves with our own marvelous tools and life on earth will be proven chaff, not wheat.

Conservatives counter that vast inequality is necessary for the sake of personal motivation. The very selfishness and rapacity of capitalism will lift up even the very poor. But progressives know that relative wealth is also extremely important. In absolute terms a tribal king might have been poorer than a Dickensian plumber, but the king sure didn’t feel that way. Because of this, the “my selfishness is your ticket to prosperity” mantra of conservatism backfires, because increasing prosperity the purely selfish way leads to increases in technology that will let the tribal king realize he’s poorer than the British plumber, and then he’ll feel poorer as well, and he’ll become resentful and bitter at your highly rationalized selfishness, particularly if he doesn’t have enough empathy or tenderness to feel for those beyond his own tribe. And then you have things like 9/11 or the sacking of Rome (from which there was never a full recovery). Add nukes and poof… So a progressive might say that advances in technology and increases in wealth will be directed toward selfish means such as war if the advances aren’t accompanied by increases and the spread of empathy and compassion. So when the progressive sees other people’s suffering, it’s both repugnant because the progressive feels others’ pain and because it signals that the world isn’t yet on a good enough course as long as other people’s suffering doesn’t outrage everyone.

I don’t function in terms of “50 words or less,” which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone here.

Don’t be surprised if few read everything, and instead read the first and last sentence only…

Of course they’re happy! In the past 8 years they’ve
1) gutted the competition
2) wrecked New Orleans

Now come on… Conservatives didn’t wreck New Orleans. A flippin’ force of nature did. The administration was just late to the clean up party.