Political disagreements between couples

Someone recently sent me a copy of a book titled "I love you but I hate your politics", by psychiatrist Jeanne Safer.  90% Of the book is a series of stories about conflicted couples:  What they did and why. And for many of the couples there were some improvements in their attitudes towards one-another after discussions with Safer.

The stories were almost all about very liberal women who suddenly found that their men liked Donald Trump.  That caused the ladies to dissolve in fury while the men mostly remained calm. Both partners usually made an effort to convert the other to their POV but none of them succeeded.

So the challenge was cohabitation. How could the lady find a way to live with a man whose political preferences were to her the embodiment of evil?  In the final pages of the book a number of sensible strategies were suggested but the conclusion was overall a sad one. Both sides had to put out of their minds thoughts that were important to them.

And in some instances no hope was possible.  A person with certain strong conservative opinions was simply a flawed character who must simply be deserted and avoided.  Some conservative opinions placed the person as a fundamentally bad person whom nothing could save

I imagine that liberal women reading the book will be comforted to see that that there are many other women like themselves and that, with effort, a conservative spouse can be lived with in moderate peace if he has other good characteristics.

My own experience has been nothing like anything in the book.  I have been married four times with lots of "try before you buy" in between the marriages.  And almost all of the women concerned have at the outset had some degree of feminist convictions.

I had the advantage however of being a libertarian/conservative  so I was almost always able to explain my views by reference to generally agreed values -- the importance of individual liberty, for instance.  And I have yet to find a woman who can answer "Yes" to the question: "Is it fair to take money off someone who has earned it and give it to someone who has not earned it?" That question strikes at the whole heart of liberalism and makes it clear that a conservative viewpoint has some point and some merit and some morality

So just by putting forward clear arguments in a peaceful and non-aggressive way, I was almost always able to get the lady to be at peace with my political views.  Mostly in fact they moved their views distinctly in my direction.  None of the women concerned were however ferociously political -- like the angry ladies described in the book.  That may be in part due to the fact that Australia is a much more relaxed country than the USA.

I would however like to meet one of those fierce American ladies.  I think that by calmly and with good humor getting them to consider the basis of their beliefs I could get them to  arrive at a much milder and more tolerant version of them. It worked for Socrates and it works for me. All you need really is to use common conservative talking points and ask the lady why they are wrong.  Because conservatives have reality on their side while Leftism is just emotionalism, there is some hope that reality may eventually intrude on the lady's mind. You just have to know your facts

Where the need for their liberal beliefs is strong, however, not much change can be expected.  They need to hang on to those beliefs. And the ladies who consulted with a psychiatrist about the evil in their husbands are surely a self-selected sample of women who badly need their political beliefs.  It is not uncommon for friends and partners to have different political views but in most cases it is tolerated as a minor quirk in the other.

So why were the ladies in Safer's sample so rage-filled?  It was almost certainly an inborn disposition.  Leftism generally is anger-fueled.  As all the surveys show, conservatives are the happy people, which leaves most Leftists as unhappy people.  And there is a large body of evidence showing that your level of happiness/unhappiness is pre-set and varies from that pre-set level only rarely and is not much influenced by events.

So liberal beliefs perform an important function.  They validate the anger that the person feels.  So when someone comes along and strikes powerfully at liberal beliefs -- as Donald Trump does -- that is very upsetting.  It challenges you whole rationale for understanding yourself.  No wonder he evokes such widespread rage.

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Trump’s lack of decorum, dignity and statesmanship

I don’t care. I can’t do without this President. He fights for America

By Evan Sayet

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer.

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush, as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship.

Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?

We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?

And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party.

I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover their tracks.

I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent.

Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished.” But in no way was he the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, it has been an all-out war, where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – until today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in its way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming.

Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that. “I cannot spare this man. He fights,” Lincoln said.

General George Patton was vulgar-talking. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and his National Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”

That is just the icing on the cake. But it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics. That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.

It is a book of such pure evil that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do. First, Trump didn’t just go after “the fake media” – and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. Trump isolated CNN. He made it personal, just as Alinsky suggested.

Then, just as Alinsky suggested, Trump employs ridicule – which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.” Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. They need to respond.

This leaves them with only two choices. They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself, and the fake news would disingenuously report that as the truth) – and begin to honestly and accurately report the news. Or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.

The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.

Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn), the mafia (Tony Rezko), or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s church.

Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing the IRS, to be used against their political opponents. Or its running guns to the Mexican drug cartels. Or told the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.

So, to my friends on the Left – and the #NeverTrumpers, as well – do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do.

These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.

So, say anything you want about this president. I get it. He can be vulgar. He can be crude. He can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights for America!

SOURCE 

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Mark Levin: Getting Rid of Detention Centers, I.C.E. 'Is the Insanity of the Radical Left'

On his nationally syndicated radio talk show “The Mark Levin Show” on Tuesday, host Mark Levin decried efforts to eliminate border detention centers and I.C.E., calling it “the insanity of the radical left.”

“So now they’re against I.C.E., which is the federal government’s interior enforcement mechanism on immigration,” stated Mark Levin. “‘Eliminate I.C.E.,’ they say. And ‘eliminate detention,’ they say. This is the insanity of the radical left!”

Mark Levin’s comments came after the House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday by a margin of 230 to 195 that would, according to The New York Times, “send $4.5 billion in humanitarian aid to the border to address horrific conditions facing a crush of migrants, attaching significant rules on how the money could be spent in the first action by Democrats to rein in President Trump’s immigration crackdown.”

Here is a transcript of Mark Levin’s remarks from his show on June 25:

“There’s two things you do with people who come here illegally, or who claim asylum status: You release them, or you detain them to try to figure out who they are and what their legal status [is] and so forth and so on.

“So if you don’t support detaining them, you support nothing – that people should walk freely into the country, and off they go, whether it’s up to Boston or Philadelphia or New York, Washington, Richmond, whether they go to Chicago Illinois, whether they go to Los Angeles or Sacramento or San Francisco or San Diego. Maybe they’ll head over to Houston, Dallas, Waco. Who knows? They’re just free to come in.

“So, what they are arguing for – listen to this; it’s important – no detention, that you are not to detain people who are coming here illegally. You’re not to ask them who they are. You’re not to ask them if they are actually the parents of these children. I want you to think about what they are arguing for. No detention centers means no detention. Where are you going to put them all, in Beverly Hills, in Palm Springs, in the Hamptons?

“So now they’re against I.C.E., which is the federal government’s interior enforcement mechanism on immigration. ‘Eliminate I.C.E.,’ they say. And ‘eliminate detention,’ they say. This is the insanity of the radical left!

“They are anti-American; they’re inhumane; they are anti-citizen. Well, what would you call it?

“Let me be abundantly clear so that even low-IQ Joe Scarborough can understand what I’m saying, so even low-IQ Chris Cuomo – the dumbest of the family – can understand what I am saying, so even smirky, snarky, stupid— Well, anyway. So, fill in the blank. If there aren’t detention centers, then you can’t detain these people. If Congress doesn’t fund these centers, then there aren’t diapers and toothpaste.”

SOURCE 

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Kevin Sorbo Exposes Left’s Hypocrisy on Immigration: Obama Was ‘Saying the Same Thing’ as Trump

In a tweet on his Twitter page, actor Kevin Sorbo, known for his roles in the hit TV shows “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” and “Andromeda” and more recently for his family-friendly, Christian films “Let There Be Light,” “God’s Not Dead” and “Christmas Dreams,” remarked on the left’s hypocrisy, pointing out that former President Barack Obama was “saying the same thing” as President Donald Trump on immigration.

“Wow.......so true,” wrote Kevin Sorbo in a tweet. “But the Left will never listen. Obama is saying the same thing Trump is saying. Incredible how Trump gets attacked for this. Not surprising, though.”

Kevin Sorbo’s tweet came in response to a tweet put out by actress and former talk show host Stacey Dash. In the tweet is a video of former President Barack Obama during a segment of a Democratic Party presidential primary debate commenting on the issue of illegal immigration on the southern border of the United States. “The reason Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008….. Is the same reason they want to impeach President Trump in 2019,” tweeted Dash.

“This administration, the Bush administration, has done nothing to control the problem that we have,” stated former President Barack Obama in the video. “We’ve had five million undocumented workers come over the borders since George Bush took office. It has become an extraordinary problem, and the reason the American people are concerned is because they are seeing their own economic positions slip away. And often times, employers are exploiting these undocumented workers; they’re not paying the minimum wage; they’re not observing worker safety laws.

“So, what we have to do is create a comprehensive solution to the problem,” continued Obama. “Now, I have already stated that as president I will make sure that we finally have the kind of border security that we need. That’s step number one. Step number two is to take on employers— Right now, they, an employer has more of a chance of getting hit by lightning than being prosecuted for hiring an undocumented worker. That has to change. They have to be held accountable. And when we do those things, when we do those things, I believe that we can take the undocumented workers who are here, get them out of the shadows, make sure that they are subject to a stiff penalty, make sure that they are learning English, make sure that they go to the back of the line so that they’re not getting an advantage over people who came here legally.

“And when we do that I think that we can, instead of shedding all this heat, start shedding some light on the problem, and we can once again be a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. That’s what I intend to do as president of the United States,” concluded Obama.

SOURCE 

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The blatant lies of Elizabeth Warren: Trump Deliberately Trying to ‘Psychologically Scar Children,’ ‘Destroy Families’

He is clearly doing no such thing.  He is just trying to hold back the flood of self-selected immigrants.  It would be a tragedy if a liar like Warren were to gain any power.  She has no honesty in her. She is pure egotistical evil

President Donald Trump’s administration is intentionally inflicting cruelty on illegal alien families, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) claimed Wednesday.

What’s more, Trump is deliberately trying to “psychologically scar children” and tear apart families, Warren charged in a Twitter post linking to an ABC News article likening illegal alien holding centers to “torture facilities”:

"What @realDonaldTrump's admin is doing is intentional cruelty – a deliberate attempt to destroy families and psychologically scar children. Shame on @realDonaldTrump & shame on his @SenateGOP allies who have done his bidding on these horrific policies."

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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