Wow. Plenty of non-SAMs here. I'm impressed.
I remember Burgess Owens. He was one of my favorites Canes of that era. Turns out he's a simpleton. Too bad. Maybe he simply needs the money. After all, conservatives lap up any book with titles like that, ones that mock liberalism.
The hilarious aspect is that it otherwise has absolutely no benefit. There is indeed an ideological shift going on, and it was revealed in the 2016 presidential election. It just wasn't the shift that aligned with the electoral result, or the brutal conventional wisdom attached. I mentioned this on West End Zone, otherwise known as SAM Central: When I started wagering on politics heavily in the early '90s there was a 12% gap between self-identified liberals and conservatives. It was 33% conservatives and 21% liberals nationwide. I quickly studied every state for how they broke down in those liberal/conservative numbers. That is invaluable toward deciphering meaningful statewide poll numbers, and ones which make no sense given the ideology. Over the past quarter century that gap dropped from 12% to 11%, then 11% to 10%, and in 2016 it finally dipped into single digits, at 35-26% or a 9% gap. I was astonished at the drop to 9%, even as white participation increased, which should have shoved it the other way or kept it at 10% at worst.
The country is steadily becoming more liberal, as the rise from 21% to 26% self-identified liberals over the past quarter century reveals. That is a startling jump. It is verified in issue questioning on subjects that measure ideological attitude and tolerance. So older conservatives like Burgess Owens may be having fun with the familiar simplistic words and taunts, similar to West End Zone, but the country and especially the youth are laughing at that and moving away from them. Trump's approval rating among Americans under 35 years old is 17%, as I mentioned last night.
And for all the conservative desperation to pretend that liberals are weak or weenies or whatever, every reliable study reveals that conservatives are actually the frail segment, the pathetic group bathed in fear. No kidding. That describes every conservative I've ever known, and the block of them who used to fruitlessly try to argue with me in Las Vegas sportsbook circles. They had three sentences of political ammo, and a world of paranoid fear. Conservatives are scared of counter opinion so they surround themselves with like-thinkers. And a comical 88% of conservatives don't trust the truth verification sites like Politico, which constantly revealed that Trump was telling 68-76% lies throughout the 2016 campaign while Hillary was far below average in that category at 28%. Petrified conservatives prefer the world in reverse. Make it go away so we can huddle in fear, while allowing Jeanine Pirro to tell us what to think. I have to give FOX credit for that hire. She is the most hilarious of all.
Here is a recent UCLA finding on conservatives as more scared than liberals. Okay, cue the simplistic ridicule of anything sourcing from California. SAMs are anything but unpredictable:
https://www.thecut.com/2017/02/are-conservatives-more-scared-of-stuff-than-liberals.html
Daniel Fessler, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, led a study in which two sets of subjects read a series of 16 statements, most of which were false, but all of which sounded like they could be true. Some of them focused more on the (fake) benefits of doing something, such as “Exercising on an empty stomach burns more calories,” while others focused on risks, such as, “terrorist attacks in the U.S. have increased since Sept 11, 2001.”
Fessler found that liberals and conservatives, as gauged by questions about their political beliefs and affiliations, were equally likely to believe in the “good” statements, but that conservatives were more likely to believe the scary ones. After explaining that humans, in general and regardless of politics, are more attuned to potential threats than to potential boons, Khazan references the “several studies [that] show that conservatives tend to be more sensitive to the possibility of danger than liberals are. That helps explain why conservatives endorse policies that minimize the introduction of new, potentially harmful influences to society, like immigration, marriage, or comprehensive *** education.” It could also help explain why they’re more likely to spread fake news, of course."
