Reflections From a Murky Pond

The meme that liberal women are on average far less attractive than conservative women is fairly mature. And now, the hypothesis that beauty is right and the right is beautiful gets some scientific research to back it up.

Dr. Rolfe D. Peterson PhD of Susquehanna University and Dr. Carl L. Palmer of Illinois State University conducted a study to determine if beauty influenced political engagement, perceived political efficacy, and core political beliefs. What they found was that when it comes to the level of mass politics, controlling for socioeconomic status, more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political engagement, political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican. Their results were consistent across datasets, measures of attractiveness, and persisted even when controls for socioeconomic strata and demographics were applied to the base results.

Personally, I think the anecdotal evidence I’ve presented above should be considered proof enough that beauty is Right and the Right is beautiful, but this is science and science demands that one disbelieve one’s own experiences unless they’re tested, proven, and the results found to be repeatable.

Peterson’s and Palmer’s Findings In A Nutshell:

Engagement

Peterson and Palmer found that more attractive individuals were more likely to more confident and, hence, more likely to participate in politics, to seek redress for grievances, and/or to exercise their political rights than the less attractive members of their peer group or demographic.

Efficacy

Frankly, this isn’t limited to politics. Political efficacy is just one of myriad arenas in which more beautiful people are more effective and impactful.  Throughout their lives, the more attractive among us have both benefited from preferential treatment and endured higher expectations. As such, they are more likely to believe they have a greater ability to affect the world around them, and that their decisions will be influential.

Alright; so far, nothing even remotely earth-shattering in the way of revelations, epiphanies, or scholarship. But also nothing outre or just plain wrongheaded. Anyone with any background in- or exposure to sociology and/or psychology knows that beauty plays a deep-seated and pervasive role in the social world. Even those without such academic knowledge normally have enough empirical and/or anecdotal evidence to under that the Beauty Premium is quite real, if probably misunderstood, overly and wrongly lamented, and not as universal as some might think.

Political Ideology

According to the two Political Science professors more attractive people tend towards more conservative / right-wing political views and, hence, tend more towards being Republicans because they’re privileged and don’t understand the plight of other people who don’t have such privilege. Messers Peterson and Palmer believe that attractive individuals have a blind spot that leads them to not see the need for more government support or aid in society because, as attractive people, they haven’t had to suffer as much as others.

And there was have the intrinsic bias that we Americans have come to expect from what passes for the Clerisy in modern universities. Of course these two believe that conservative political views and the GOP are based upon not caring about the “Have Nots,” and of course they believe that attractive people gravitate to those positions because of their “privilege” and lack of empathy for those who lack such.

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So, there you all go. A bit more than the pure snark and prurience that one probably expected. 😉

Yeah, the comma in this post’s title is actually important. This isn’t about the courts imposing racial quotas; it’s about Chuck Schumer trying to impose race quotas on the Court. Chuck Schumer had the audacity and unmitigated gall to stand on the floor of the Senate and reject one of President Trump’s judicial nominees, Marvin Quattlebaum because and, if one is to lend Schumer the hand-out of credence, only because he’s White.

Not, of course, that Schumer’s racist narrative, childish actions, or Oppositional Defiance Disorder made any difference in the outcome. The Senate voted 69-28 – that vote included 19 Dem Yea’s – to confirm Marvin Quattlebaum as a US district judge for South Carolina.

No, this was just Schumer’s cynical ploy to paint his refusal to vote for any nominee put forth by America’s President, Donald Trump as an exercise in social justice, something that Schumer has an “interesting” track record with. After all, the only thing that Schumer and the Dems have is their narrative that President Trump is racist, sexist, and xenophobic…oh yeah, and nationalist.

“Snow Predicted”

Yeah, that’s about as iconic as one can get when it comes to how so many Americans react to any prediction of severe weather. 🙄