Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?
It may be one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals.
They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction. These links are so solidly evidenced that, for the most part, modern social scientists simply try to explain them. They’ve put forth numerous possible explanations.
There are a couple clear contributors to point out first. Marriage tends to make people happier, and conservatives are more likely to be married. Religious belief is also linked to happiness, and conservatives tend to be more religious.
But these explanations don’t account for the entire gap, which equates to about a half-point on a four-point scale, a sizable happiness divide.
Social psychologist Jaime Napier, program head of psychology at New York University-Abu Dhabi has conducted research suggesting that views about inequality play a role.
“One of the biggest correlates with happiness in our surveys was the belief of a meritocracy, which is the belief that anybody who works hard can make it,” she told PBS. “That was the biggest predictor of happiness. That was also one of the biggest predictors of political ideology. So, the conservatives were much higher on these meritocratic beliefs than liberals were.”
To paraphrase, conservatives are less concerned with equality of outcomes and more with equality of opportunity. While American liberals are depressed by inequalities in society, conservatives are OK with them provided that everyone has roughly the same opportunities to succeed. The latter is a more rosy and empowering view than the deterministic former.
Two other studies explored a more surprising contributor: neuroticism, typically defined as “a tendency toward anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and other negative feelings.” Surveyed conservatives consistently score lower in neuroticism than surveyed liberals.
In 2011, psychologists at the University of Florida and the University of Toronto conducted four studies, aiming to find whether conservatives are more “positively adjusted” than liberals.
They found that conservatives “expressed greater personal agency, more positive outlook, more transcendent moral beliefs, and a generalized belief in fairness” compared with liberals.
They added:
The portrait of conservatives that emerges is different from the view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality.
Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general … report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems (all after controlling for age, sex, income, and education), and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity.
Liberals have become less happy over the last several decades, but this decline is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions.
There have been a few studies that attempted to rain on conservatives’ happiness parade. In one, scientists proposed that conservatives might simply be more inclined to provide socially desirable answers to surveys than liberals. Society expects you to be happy, and so conservatives say that they are.
In another, researchers found that while conservatives certainly report being more happy than liberals, liberals tend to display more signs of happiness, as evidenced by uploading more smiling photographs on Linkedin and posting more positive tweets on Twitter. So, maybe conservatives just think they’re happier, or judge happiness differently?
Regardless, the gap remains. So, if you need some cheering up, maybe turn to a conservative friend, rather than a liberal one.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/08/30/why-are-conservatives-happier-than-liberals/
*************************************************Vegan Restaurant Flops, Owners Left with No Choice But to Close Down and Begin Selling Meat
Moral posturing in food choices sounds fine on paper, but it turns out it doesn’t exactly pay the bills — at least not at a well-known British vegan restaurant.
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, The Mango Tree, in the English town of Taunton, about 150 miles southwest of London, is closing for a bit of renovation. When it opens back up in the fall, it won’t just be the space inside that will change.
The menu has also been renovated — and it now includes meat.
Yes, heresy. As the Daily Mail notes, “those who loved the plant-based values have hit out saying ‘selling meat is worse than closing.'”
However, the restaurant explained that it had no choice but to adapt, given the circumstances.
The change became a matter of contention after a Facebook post by the restaurant on Aug. 27 that didn’t explicitly mention the addition of meat to the menu.
“Our final day as The Mango Tree is approaching fast, before we close our doors for a little while, ready to open our new restaurant in the autumn — same location, same team and including some of our renowned plant based dishes, alongside exciting new menu options and a brand new vibe!” the post read.
The post added that, when the restaurant reopens, it “will be serving a variety of dishes to accommodate a wide variety of dietary needs and preferences.” This includes meat, obviously.
Vegans were horrified.
“I’m very saddened to hear this as someone who put so much energy into your restaurant I understand entirely why you are doing this but from a vegan standpoint I would see this as unethical practice,” one user wrote.
“The non vegans will probably be happy to see this but sadly I think you may have lost my business from now as I cannot support this decision wishing you the best.”
The restaurant responded by saying “continuing as a purely vegan restaurant has not been sustainable for a considerable amount of time as there are simply not enough customers supporting us in our current format.”
And, as for those who were whining about the ethics of meat-eating, management asked them to consider the ethics of putting people out of work.
“The only other option was to close permanently,” the restaurant wrote.
“Ethics extend to the jobs and welfare of our wonderful team, to whom we owe a great deal, and another chance.”
But for these carpers, the only life that matters is animal life.
“Veganism isn’t a business venture. It’s an ethical philosophy that does the best for the animals, the planet, and public health,” one user wrote.
“Introducing animal products to a menu in a town that has so many other restaurants makes no sense. It immediately increases the environmental footprint. It means that the restaurant immediately starts to support animals going through hell again.”
Not that one restaurant will change the environmental footprint — and it’s eminently clear that there aren’t enough actual humans willing to follow Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum down the primrose path to a plant-based diet.
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I've been called a Nazi for saying women don't have penises'
A women's rights campaigner says the pro-trans lobby has branded her a Nazi and made sick slurs about hoping her children develop cancer.
Kellie-Jay Keen, who founded Standing For Women, told MailOnline her events had been hit by a number of threats and warnings.
She spoke out after officers from Sussex Constabulary were alerted to a number of menacing messages against her.
They included many branding Ms Keen - who is also known as Posie Parker - a TERF and urging people to 'Fight her by any means you see fit'.
It came ahead of a planned Let Women Speak event in Brighton on September 18, which is billed as a 'Speakers' Corner tour'.
Ms Keen - a mother-of-four - has frequently attracted the ire of pro-trans activists over her views on gender rights.
She told MailOnline: 'I have been called a Nazi for saying I don’t think women have penises. Once you can portray someone as the most heinous person in society – a Nazi – I guess anything goes.
‘I have had a lot of threats over the years, I have been told about how they hope my children get cancer.
'Sadly, it’s not unusual for trans activists to issue threats about women wanting to talk about our rights – JK Rowling is a prime example of that.
‘We are subjected to a wide range of menacing messages.
‘I think the whole social media thing depersonalises people as well. We have been dehumanised by the term TERF. There are some quite disturbed people within that group, like others I guess.
‘It’s a very effective campaign that we are supposed to believe that men that want to call themselves women are the most vulnerable group in society.
‘When I was a bit younger I could walk to Tesco with my children and some man would tell me what they thought of my appearance. We as women sadly have become used to these regular infringements. I think the whole identity politics issue is a poison.
‘The event will go ahead. We have sent Sussex Police information on how many people are expected to attend. They have been really good actually.’
This is the latest development in a continuing debate over biologically born women's rights compared to those who have transitioned from a different gender.
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Federal Court Ruling on Gender Identity Upends Civil Rights Law
Leftists will make a law say anything they want it to say
In a shocking and first-of-its-kind reading of a more than 30-year-old disability law, a federal judge ruled that the distress that results from a person feeling that he or she is the wrong sex is a disability that must be accommodated under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
If the opinion is left to stand, it would open the door for those who consider themselves transgender and feel clinically distressed to receive public accommodations in bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, same-sex housing, and more.
U.S. Circuit Judge Diana Gribbon Motz of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote the majority opinion for the divided three-judge panel in Williams v. Kincaid, holding that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, gender dysphoria is a “disability.” Judge Pamela Harris joined Motz’s opinion to form the majority.
The ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including employment, education, transportation, and in places that are open to the general public (public accommodations).
So, what is the practical impact of this decision? It means that those with gender dysphoria—an “incongruence between (someone’s) gender identity and assigned sex” that results in “clinically significant distress,” as the American Psychiatric Association defines it—are not only protected from discrimination because of that so-called disability, but they are entitled to reasonable accommodations for it.
In the case of former Fairfax County, Virginia, prisoner Kesha Williams, that “reasonable accommodation” should have, according to the court, included sending Williams (a biological male) back into the women’s prison. Williams had filed a disability discrimination claim against various prison employees alleging mistreatment while incarcerated.
However, in order to reach this conclusion, the majority had to clear one very big hurdle: the language of the ADA itself, which explicitly excludes:
(a) Homosexuality and bisexuality For purposes of the definition of “disability” in section 12102(2)?[1] of this title, homosexuality and bisexuality are not impairments and as such are not disabilities under this chapter. (b) Certain conditions Under this chapter, the term “disability” shall not include— (1) transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, or other sexual behavior disorders.
Because the statute clearly eliminates disability protections for “gender identity disorder,” Motz engaged in a contorted legal analysis to determine that gender dysphoria was not actually a gender identity disorder. To reach that conclusion, she did not look to the statute’s language at the time of its enactment, but to a much more recent change on gender-related psychiatric diagnoses—one not envisioned, anticipated, or incorporated by the ADA’s original drafters in 1990.
Motz relied heavily on a change made by the American Psychiatric Association in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, or DSM-5, in 2013. The DSM-5 is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States.
At that time, the APA replaced “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria.” Because the change focused the diagnosis on the distress that some people who consider themselves transgender experience (and for which they may seek psychiatric, medical, and surgical treatments) instead of on a desire to be a gender other than the one they were born to, Motz determined that such a change was good enough to stretch the ADA well beyond the limits of what Congress determined it ought to originally bear.
She wrote:
In sum, the APA’s removal of the ”gender identity disorder” diagnosis and the addition of the ”gender dysphoria” diagnosis to the DSM-5 reflected a significant shift in medical understanding. The obsolete diagnosis focused solely on cross-gender identification; the modern one on clinically significant distress … Put simply, while the older DSM pathologized the very existence of transgender people, the recent DSM-5’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria takes as a given that being transgender is not a disability and affirms that a transgender person’s medical needs are just as deserving of treatment and protection as anyone else’s.
In sum: If you’re “distressed” about being transgender, then you’re entitled to all the accommodations you’d like in public life, whether in bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, or same-sex housing. The illogical conclusion, of course, is that transgender individuals who might be perfectly at ease with their underlying biological sex are not entitled to accommodations at all. As to how this will play out in modern America, one thing is for sure: It will be messy.
The court has not only established the possibility that employers, schools, prisons, hospitals, and other entities will have to make judgment calls on when an accommodation is required and when it isn’t, it also creates a loophole for those who consider themselves transgender who might want to demand future accommodations but who may not, in reality, experience any distress at all.
In his well-reasoned dissent, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum pointed out that the case was really a matter of simple statutory construction, and that the majority’s ruling wasn’t supported by the law’s text when it was enacted.
He wrote:
As Williams notes, some organizations have removed the phrase gender identity disorder from their publications altogether and clarified that distress and discomfort from identifying with a different gender from the gender assigned at birth constitutes gender dysphoria, not a gender identity disorder. But even if Williams is correct about such changes in understanding, linguistic drift cannot alter the meaning of words in the ADA when it was enacted. And at that time, the meaning of gender identity disorders included gender dysphoria as alleged by Williams … Under basic principles of statutory construction, Williams’ ADA claim should be dismissed … [W]hen the ADA was signed into law, gender identity disorder was understood to include what Williams alleges to be gender dysphoria.
While the decision only directly covers those entities within the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and West Virginia), the court’s opinion has fanned the flames of controversy over transgender rights on a greater scale. It is also a prime example of why textualism—the interpretation of the law based on the ordinary meaning of the words as they were understood at the time of the law’s enactment—matters.
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Texas Rangers Only Baseball Team Standing Strong, Refusing to Host ‘Pride Night’
There’s good news, and there’s bad news. The good news is, the Major League Baseball Texas Rangers “have come under enormous fire from powerful LGBT groups for not giving in and having a Pride night,” National Review’s Nate Hochman said on “Washington Watch.”
Wait a minute, you’re thinking, that sounds bad. How is that good news? Well, it’s good by comparison to the bad news: Every other MLB team (29 out of 30) has hosted a Pride night, and many do so “every single year.” Way to go for the Texas Rangers’ courageous stand against the tsunami of corporate wokeness.
Hochman “spent the last couple of weeks digging into exactly what kinds of LGBT activist groups and medical clinics MLB franchises and teams were funding under the auspices of these LGBT-themed pride nights.”
What he found makes a drag queen story hour seem like “Sesame Street.” For 20 out of the 29 teams, these Pride nights were “funding groups that were either promoting sex changes for children as young as 12 years old, or … actually providing them themselves.”
Nothing says baseball like permanently sterilizing children.
Hochman writes:
At least six of those teams promoted or funded organizations that lobby against restrictions on youth sex-change surgeries and for policies such as ‘gender-affirming’ curricula for elementary-school children and ‘trans-inclusive’ K-12 sports.
Five other team Pride Nights promoted or funded groups that provide resources for, and often actively encourage, youth sex changes. Four promoted or funded groups that write referrals for, or partner with, clinics that perform medical gender transitions—either via hormone-altering drugs, sex-change surgeries, or both—on minors.
And finally, five teams have promoted or funded clinics that do drug-induced or surgical youth gender transitions themselves.
Adding insult to injury (or, more precisely, mutilation), Hochman warns, this transgender slush money is coming straight from ticket sales. It would be bad enough if millionaire athletes dropped a few thousand dollars here and there to terrible political causes. We all expect that. But we don’t expect it when America’s most popular teams from America’s pastime siphon “tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars” straight from ballpark patrons.
Hey, dad, if you bring your son to 20 games this season, we’ll be sure his classmate gets a double mastectomy at 16 for free!
This has got to stop, but how? “Obviously, Major League Baseball is not advertising this,” said “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm, which implies that it’s vulnerable to pressure. In fact, pressure from the transgender lobby forced it into this unconscionable behavior to begin with.
“Essentially, the LGBT mafia comes and says, ‘Unless you give us money, we’re going to ruin your reputation … but if you give us money, then we’ll just go away quietly,’” suggested Backholm. That character assassination is now targeting the Texas Rangers, the final holdout.
Hochman added that MLB executives could feel pressure from both sides. “Like a lot of corporate leaders, they’re not necessarily far-left ideologues. They’re just driven by incentive structure.”
Currently, their incentives are telling them to fund LGBT groups and Pride nights. “From their perspective, they’re going to get a ton of grief … get threatened by their sponsors … get threatened by powerful activist groups,” he added. “They just figure that it’s less of a headache to fund it.”
The LGBT lobby may have the bases loaded, but conservatives can still escape a blowout by finding a way to end the inning. “It’s up to fans … who basically make up the revenue stream for the MLB, to actually push back and say that this is unacceptable,” Hochman advised. “This is America’s pastime.”
Major League Baseball is “getting away with” this “partially because I think a lot of fans just don’t have time to pay attention.” But the choice is clear: Either fans pay attention, or they’ll inadvertently pay to fund gender-transition surgeries on minors.
Hochman suggested a second prong to operate alongside fan-based pressure, to help restore MLB to its senses; namely, politics. “Ron DeSantis in Florida … demonstrated to Disney that there are going to be political consequences if they try to inflict this stuff on Florida’s children.” Stuck between political and social pressure, baseball teams might just return to playing ball.
The idea is “turning this into an actual movement,” Hochman explained, “that changes the incentive structure for organizations like the MLB, so that they realize that they’re actually going to get more grief from the right and from conservatives than they are going to get from the left and from progressives.”
Building a movement takes time, commitment, and a lot of persuasion. But it’s possible. And, to save a generation of young people from permanent, bodily harm, it’s essential.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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