Are conservatives more emotional?

That good ol' projection again.  As a pretty good general rule, if you want to know what is true of liberals, just look at what they say about conservatives.  Seeing your own faults in others is not only good  psychological defence but it's a pretty good political tactic too.  If one side of politics is (say) full of hate, constant accusations from that side accusing others of hate may well cause uncommitted voters to say, "A plague on both their houses" and believe that both sides are equally haters.  So the constant accusations from liberals that conservatives are guilty of hate speech and racism makes good tactics.

And if there is one thing we know about liberals it is that they are always on the boil.  They are always outraged about something and are constantly protesting.  They are clearly the more emotional side of politics.  You just have to note the utter rage that pours out from Leftists in the comments they leave on conservative sites and on Twitter in replying to conservative tweets.  And their use of foul language is also hugely disproportionate.  And, as has often been said, bad language is the attempt of a weak mind to express itself forcefully.

So the piece of research below is very predictable.  On the basis of the flimsiest evidence, they assert that it is conservatives who are more emotional.

Their evidence is that in portraits of themselves most people show the left side of the face but there is a slight tendency for conservatives to show that side more often.

I could go on but such hugely silly "evidence" just doesn't seem to warrant any further bother.  Leftists will clutch at anything to discredit conservatives.


Right-Wing Politicians Prefer the Emotional Left

Nicole A. Thomas et al

Abstract

Physiological research suggests that social attitudes, such as political beliefs, may be partly hard-wired in the brain. Conservatives have heightened sensitivity for detecting emotional faces and use emotion more effectively when campaigning. As the left face displays emotion more prominently, we examined 1538 official photographs of conservative and liberal politicians from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States for an asymmetry in posing.

Across nations, conservatives were more likely than liberals to display the left cheek. In contrast, liberals were more likely to face forward than were conservatives. Emotion is important in political campaigning and as portraits influence voting decisions, conservative politicians may intuitively display the left face to convey emotion to voters.

SOURCE

A good summary of the boiling hate continually emanating from the Left is here

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Obamacare's famous "mandate" disappears

A central part of Obamacare abolished by the Obama adminstration

ObamaCare's implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.

That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.

In 2013, HHS decided that ObamaCare's wave of policy terminations qualified as a "hardship" that entitled people to a special type of coverage designed for people under age 30 or a mandate exemption. HHS originally defined and reserved hardship exemptions for the truly down and out such as battered women, the evicted and bankrupts.

But amid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you "believe that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance policy" or "you consider other available policies unaffordable."

This lax standard—no formula or hard test beyond a person's belief—at least ostensibly requires proof such as an insurer termination notice. But people can also qualify for hardships for the unspecified nonreason that "you experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance," which only requires "documentation if possible." And yet another waiver is available to those who say they are merely unable to afford coverage, regardless of their prior insurance. In a word, these shifting legal benchmarks offer an exemption to everyone who conceivably wants one.

Keep in mind that the White House argued at the Supreme Court that the individual mandate to buy insurance was indispensable to the law's success, and President Obama continues to say he'd veto the bipartisan bills that would delay or repeal it. So why are ObamaCare liberals silently gutting their own creation now?

The answers are the implementation fiasco and politics. HHS revealed Tuesday that only 940,000 people signed up for an ObamaCare plan in February, bringing the total to about 4.2 million, well below the original 5.7 million projection. The predicted "surge" of young beneficiaries isn't materializing even as the end-of-March deadline approaches, and enrollment decelerated in February.

Meanwhile, a McKinsey & Company survey reports that a mere 27% of people joining the exchanges were previously uninsured through February. The survey also found that about half of people who shopped for a plan but did not enroll said premiums were too expensive, even though 80% of this group qualify for subsidies. Some substantial share of the people ObamaCare is supposed to help say it is a bad financial value. You might even call it a hardship.

HHS is also trying to pre-empt the inevitable political blowback from the nasty 2015 tax surprise of fining the uninsured for being uninsured, which could help reopen ObamaCare if voters elect a Republican Senate this November. Keeping its mandate waiver secret for now is an attempt get past November and in the meantime sign up as many people as possible for government-subsidized health care. Our sources in the insurance industry are worried the regulatory loophole sets a mandate non-enforcement precedent, and they're probably right. The longer it is not enforced, the less likely any President will enforce it.

The larger point is that there have been so many unilateral executive waivers and delays that ObamaCare must be unrecognizable to its drafters, to the extent they ever knew what the law contained.

SOURCE

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David Horowitz Exposes Why Progressives Must Lie

In his book Disinformation, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet Bloc official ever to defect to the United States, describes the Soviet intelligence practice called "framing" – changing someone's or something's past to suit present political needs.

The Soviets perfected this into a science. Jamie Glazov, editor of FrontPageMag.com, detailed a personal encounter with this Marxist science when he described a 1971 document KGB chairman Yuri Andropov wrote about Jamie's father, Soviet dissident Yuri Glazov:

    "Yuri Andropov is discussing the operation to put the drugs and the documents into the apartment and then five pages later is discussing my father being a drug trafficker and a spy. You see, there’s a self-intoxication here. You create the lie and then somewhere along the process you begin to believe that lie that you yourself have created, and this is a very fascinating phenomenon."

Jamie's boss, David Horowitz, lived this lie for many years. He knows that without lies, the ideology of the left would cease to exist. This is the central truth Horowitz relentlessly reinforces in Progressives, Volume II of The Black Book of the American Left.

Horowitz wastes no time defining what drives the left. On page 3, he states:

    The belief in a perfect future inevitably inspires a passionate (and otherwise inexplicable) hatred towards the imperfect present. The first agenda of social redeemers is to dismantle the existing social order, which means their intellectual and political energies are focused on the work of destruction.

With a false utopia as their goal, the left grants itself permission to commit any crime. With this is a free pass to lie about everything. In their world the victims of Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and (today) Hamas are all airbrushed from history; the go-to source for political knowledge is Noam Chomsky, the "Guru of the Anti-American Left;" and, most importantly, any deviation is a menace to be snuffed out with an iron fist.

In one of his most revealing essays, Horowitz reviews how in one year (1999), three leading icons of the left were exposed as having crafted fake biographies for themselves:

Rigoberta Menchu – Claimed to have been a landless peasant and an innocent victim of U.S. Imperialism; was actually from a wealthy landowning family and an agent of a Soviet-backed armed gang which picked a fight with a military dictatorship, then blamed the result on America.
 
Betty Friedan – Claimed to have been an ordinary suburban housewife who realized she lived in a "comfortable concentration camp" and took action to liberate women from American home life; was actually a lifelong Communist and an activist dedicated to overturning capitalism – by overturning family values (as Marx and Engels prescribed).
 
Edward Said – Claimed to have been a refugee chased from the Jerusalem house he grew up in by a famous Jewish scholar after Israel was created; was actually only born in Jerusalem because his mother was visiting family there when her water broke and spent his entire childhood in Cairo (as Justus Reid Weiner wrote of this discovery: "On [Said's] birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local address."). Additionally, it was Said's aunt that evicted the Jewish scholar from the house – where he had been legally living with his grandchildren as refugees from Nazi Germany – and not the other way around.

To normal people, living a lie is a sickening existence. In fact, even somewhat abnormal, melancholy people like Edgar Allan Poe recognized the trouble one would have living with a Tell-Tale Heart. However, some people are so morally putrid that they can immerse themselves in a world of falsehoods and still sleep like babies. At the same time, those individuals among the left who are unwilling to be perpetually fake and hypocritical are treated like heretics.

"This tainting and ostracism of sinners is the secret power of the leftist faith," wrote Horowitz. "It is what keeps the faithful in line." The late Christopher Hitchens had longtime left-wing "friends" lining up to publicly end their friendships with him when he dared to call out the compulsive lying of Bill Clinton. For all their talk about "comrades", loyalty to friends, family, and country are secondary and sacrificial to the fib of the day.

In Andrew Breitbart and Stephen K. Bannon's film Occupy Unmasked, Horowitz explained:

    "Communism, which killed 100 million people in its course – in peacetime, not in war but in peacetime – and bankrupted whole continents, created unimaginable poverty for a billion people, artificial mass starvation where millions upon millions of people died because of government schemes that didn't work, showed that this Socialist idea is a bankrupt idea; there's nothing there."

SOURCE

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Horowitz at Heritage Foundation: 'The Communist Party Is The Democratic Party'

On Tuesday, former Marxist-turned-conservative icon David Horowitz spoke at the Heritage Foundation to mark the launch of what will be a ten-volume compendium of his writings on leftism, The Black Book of the American Left. In his wide-ranging speech, Horowitz described his transition from left to right, and discussed the shortcomings of a conservative movement unwilling to deal with the ugly realities of what the American left represents.

Horowitz began by distinguishing the David Horowitz Freedom Center from other think tanks, instead characterizing it as a “battle tank.” He labeled himself “monomaniacal” in his focus on the left and its relation to communism. “There are hedgehogs and foxes. The foxes know many things. And the hedgehogs know one thing. I am a hedgehog,” he joked.

“My parents called themselves progressives,” Horowitz explained with regard to his communist parents. “The agenda was a Soviet America...the slogan of the communist party in those days was peace, jobs, democracy. Sound familiar?”

That was the theme of Horowitz’s speech as he continued: how the communists had taken over the Democratic Party. “The communist party is the Democratic Party,” Horowitz stated. “In The Great Gatsby, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald describes the rich as people who break things and leave them for others to clean up. That is a wonderful description of the left.” Horowitz, who began as a radical Marxist, said that the modern left had learned stealth from their failures in the 1960s: “The left have learned from the 1960s...we in the 1960s didn't want to pretend to be Jeffersonian democrats...That's why we failed in the 1960s. That's why they've succeeded now.”

But the right, Horowitz pointed out, has failed to acknowledge that reality. On Obamacare, for example, Horowitz railed against the language used by the left: “single-payer.” Instead, he said, “it is communism,” pointing out that it was state ownership of the means of production. He added, “The left hate the Constitution because Madison designed it to thwart them.”

Horowitz then analyzed what he claimed were the four features of the leftist mentality. First, he said, the left and right are on opposite sides of the “fundamental divide of the modern age”: the left believes that human beings are inherently good and infinitely malleable, and so can be shaped by proper state guidance. Conservatives, by contrast, believe that human beings are responsible for social problems, and concentrating power in the hands of humans is dangerous.

Second, Horowitz said, the left are characterized by the belief that “history is a forward march.” Obama, Horowitz claimed, is a deep believer in this concept, all the way down to his carpet in the Oval Office, which assures those who enter that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. “Leftism is a crypto-religion,” he explained. “They see themselves as a savior. People who believe that redemption will take place in this life and I will be a part of it, that's Hitler. That's Mao...That's the American left.”

Third, Horowitz said that the left was characterized by “alienation from this country... What weakens America is actually good.” Horowitz cited the Obama administration’s eager withdrawal from Iraq as evidence of that proposition: “Obama betrayed every American who gave their life for the people of Iraq.” He also slammed the Obama administration with regard to Benghazi: “Benghazi is the most shameful act in the history of the American presidency.”

Finally, said Horowitz, the American left “lie. And it's not like politicians spinning...you cannot be a leftist without lying about the most basic strategic facts about who you are.”

Horowitz summed up pessimistically: “We are within reach of a totalitarian state in this country…These are very very dark days for this country.” But, Horowitz held out hope: “there's been an earthquake on the conservative side since I switched sides...the tea party is the earthquake. The best thing that Republicans can do is stop the fratricide.”

SOURCE

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