Liberals // Current

Democratic base unhappy with many Cabinet Choices/"Furious about keeping Gates"

While Obama seems like the President in many ways already due to his efficiency and preparation....many people in the Democratic... more

barbara3d
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Canada's Coup d'Etat

TORONTO (AP) — Canada's opposition parties say talks to topple the government are progressing well and that moves by... more

renbyrd
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Election or New Coalition?

Conservatives were fighting a desperate public relations war trying to convince Canadians that a government with Stephane Dion as... more

urlspotter
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Tories fail to work with other parites

Unable to win support from any of the three other parties in parliament Harper's government may fall. The motion on which the... more

urlspotter
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Talking Turkey: Liberals are Wimps..godless...immoral...and Hate America!

Big steaming heapin' helpings of liberal-bashing are likely to be featured prominently on the menu next to the mashed... more

uppityprogressive
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Basics | Obama and McCain Walk Into a Bar ...

While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s supporters have a better sense of humor? In strict accordance with experimental protocol, we begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:

A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”

C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.

Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study. (You can rate some of the others at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The researchers picked out a variety of jokes — good, bad, conventional, absurdist — to look for differences in reactions between self-described liberals and conservatives.

They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes, like the one about the golfing widower, that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor, like Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” about the reindeer effect and Hambone.

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

“I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”

Do conservatives have more fun? Should liberals start describing themselves as humor-challenged? To investigate these questions, we need to delve into the science of humor (not a funny enterprise), starting with two basic kinds of humor identified in the 1980s by Willibald Ruch, a psychologist who now teaches at the University of Zurich.

The first category is incongruity-resolution humor, or INC-RES in humor jargon. It covers traditional jokes and cartoons in which the incongruity of the punch line (the husband who misses his wife’s funeral) can be resolved by other information (he’s playing golf). You can clearly get the joke, and it often reinforces stereotypes (the golf-obsessed husband).

Dr. Ruch and other researchers reported that this humor, with its orderly structure and reinforcement of stereotypes, appealed most to conservatives who shunned ambiguity and complicated new ideas, and who were more repressed and conformist than liberals.

The second category, nonsense humor, covers many “Far Side” cartoons, Monty Python sketches and “Deep Thoughts.” The punch line’s incongruity isn’t neatly resolved — you’re left to enjoy the ambiguity and absurdity of the reindeer effect or Hambone’s affection for dolphins. This humor was reported to appeal to liberals because of their “openness to ideas” and their tendency to “seek new experiences.”While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s... more

bedeboop
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30 days ago

Speaking as a Liberal-- WHY I HATE LIBERALS

A criticism of the liberal/progressive movement in the USA.

asherp
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82 responses

1 month ago

Integrating Democratic Headquarters in Wheeling, W.Va.

How West Virginia came to grips with Obama's rise..... video.

starr111
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1 month ago

Things go sideways for a Liberal party wonderboy

He was powerful, having helped Paul Martin dispatch former prime minister Jean Chretien from 24 Sussex Drive. Then he cemented his... more

urlspotter
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1 month ago

Congresswoman calls Obama, Liberals Anti-American

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann last week on Hardball claimed that liberals, including Barack Obama are anti-American and that she... more

Colonial_Zombie
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11 responses

1 month ago

Let’s Go Nuclear

How do you know when a Green—hardcore environmentalist—is lying to you? When his lips are moving. Okay, it’s a... more

HansGruen
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1 response

1 month ago

Canadian arts community plays strategically

The Department of Culture is advocating for anyone but Harper this election year. Izida Zorde is the Editor of Fuse Magazine,... more

Vierotchka
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1 month ago

Canadians want to keep health care system

Barry Kay: Most Canadians want more funding for health care and are concerned about climate change. Part 3 The 2008 Canadian... more

Vierotchka
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3 responses

1 month ago

Bush has bigger heart than Obama

Copy and Paste the Link here - http://www.creators.com/opinion/larry-elder.html

Obama calls increasing taxes and giving them to the needy a matter of "neighborliness." Vice presidential running mate Joe Biden calls it a matter of "patriotism."

Yet when it comes to charitable giving, neither Obama (until recently) nor Biden feels sufficiently neighborly or patriotic to donate as much as does the average American household: 2 percent of their adjusted gross income.

In 2007, President George W. Bush and his wife had an adjusted gross income of $923,807. They paid $221,635 in taxes, and donated $165,660 to charity — or 18 percent of their income. Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, in 2007, had a taxable income of $3.04 million. And they paid $602,651 in taxes, and donated $166,547 to charity — or 5.5 percent of their income.

Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, earned between $200,000 and $300,000 a year between 2000 and 2004, and they donated less than 1 percent to charity. When their income soared to $4.2 million in 2007, their charitable contributions went up to 5 percent.

Joe and Jill Biden, by contrast, made $319,853 and gave $995 to charity in 2007, or 0.3 percent of their income. And that was during the year Biden was running for president. Over the past 10 years, the Bidens earned $2,450,042 and gave $3,690 to charity — or 0.1 percent of their income.
Liberal families earn about 6 percent more than conservative families, yet conservative households donate about 30 percent more to charity than do liberal households. And conservatives give more than just to their own churches and other houses of worship. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, give far more money and donate more of their time to nonreligious charitable causes than do liberals — especially secular liberals.

So let's sum up. The "compassionate" liberals — at least based on charitable giving — show less compassion than "hardhearted" conservatives. The rich pay more in income taxes than people think. Voters, clueless about the facts, want the rich to pay still more.

Copy and Paste the Link here - http://www.creators.com/opinion/larry-elder.html Obama calls increasing taxes and giving them to... more