Arlo said:
Interestingly, the 10 states with the highest divorce rates are all
conservative states. More interestingly, 8 of the 10 states with the lowest
divorce rates are liberal states.
Craig replied:
Shame on you. This is sophomoric statistical manipulation. Nothing of
significance can be concluded by examining so-called "conservative" (like
the Nevada of gambling & prostitution?) or "liberal" states. If instead,
you look at counties instead of states, you see that either category of
state consists of a mixture of so-called "conservative" or "liberal"
counties, generally tracking rural, suburban & urban areas. The only
interesting conclusion that can be derived is by comparing divorce rate for
PEOPLE who are conservative or liberal.
dmb says:
I think its safe to assume that the stats are based on the divorce rates of
people in those states. I mean, the same pattern appears no matter how you
break it down. In the case of counties, you'd see the same difference pop
up. And I think there is an intelligible psychological reason for this
trend. There's probably a more specific name for this phenomenon, but its
basically a form of projection. As we've all seen in news stories, moral
crusaders often turn out to be engaged in a huge battle with their own
demons. Mark Foley was involved in various projects to protect children from
sexual preditors and then turned out to be exactly that. There was a guy at
the FBI who was in charge of the anti-child porn unit. Turns out he was
quite the pervert too. Then there was the anti-drug, anti-homosexual
preacher who was discovered to be having sex with a gay prositute, one who
did double duty as his drug dealer. Newt Gingrich was having an affair with
one of his young aides even while he was busy impeaching Clinton for exactly
that. See, this goes way beyond hypocrisy. Its pretty clear that people tend
to deny their own faults and project them onto others, as if they could
eradicate their own problems by attacking people who remind them of those
problems. I think people would be shocked if they knew how many anti-gay gay
people there were among conservatives. Or how about the anti-abortion
protestors. I bet the majority of them have had abortions and their
participation in that movement, more than anything else, serves to relieve
their guilt and to distance themselves from a very regretable decision.
Basically, people are concerned with the issues that they themselves are
most concerned with, especially when they don't quite realize what they're
doing.
Anyway, the stats bear this out. The social pathologies that most concern
the "family values" crowd are precisely the pathologies they suffer from
most. They project it onto "Hollywood Liberals", leftist intellectuals and
other groups they don't identify with, but basically we're talking about
people who hate these qualities in themselves. Its a kind of unexamined
self-loathing. And it makes people really, really mean and judgemental. Its
a very common form of mental illness and self-deception from which none of
us are immune. And yes, it shows up in red states, red counties and red
families more than blue. Ideology tends to reflect a person's psychology. I
mean, people like to think that their political beliefs are based on
rational decisions but that's not really how it works. We can see this
tendency to project evil onto others throughout the conservative ideology in
this country. The reds tend to have negative attitudes about minorities and
foreigners of all kinds insofar as they serve as a field of projection, as
"the other" to be scapegoated. That's why, if you're a bigot, a misogynist,
a homo-phobe, a xenophobe or anything like that, you're gonna find yourself
more at home in the Republican Party.
And here we are talking about anti-intellectual, social level
neo-Victorians. The so-called family values conservatives are actually a lot
less moral than they'd like to think and represent a slide backward in terms
of the evolution of morals. In their hands, as we have seen, principles such
as democracy and human rights too often take a back seat to lesser kinds of
moral codes such as the one's against vice.
I think all this has quite a lot to do with the way people reacted to Bush's
anti-UN, "axis of evil" based foreign policy. The conservatives say, "damn
straight, those guys are evil and God is on our side". The liberals hear the
same speeches and say, "You've got to be kidding!"
dmb
_________________________________________________________________
Cant afford to quit your job? Earn your AS, BS, or MS degree online in 1
year.
http://www.classesusa.com/clickcount.cfm?id=866145&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.classesusa.com%2Ffeaturedschools%2Fonlinedegreesmp%2Fform-dyn1.html%3Fsplovr%3D866143
moq_discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
