“Between now and the election, explain to me how can we tell the difference between a good, anonymous conservative Freeper refusing to vote for Romney on principle, and a covert leftist operative posting on this site to discourage votes against the Kenyan?”
Good luck with that! Or discerning the difference between someone who is a willardite because they’re sincere (albeit misguided), or are just on the payroll.
Only thing I can suggest is looking at how long they’ve been here and how often they post. Someone who has been here a decade and has posts numbering in the 5 or 6 digits is probably not an operative. Conversely a n00b or someone with 50 posts is more suspect.
I gave up on trying to discern underlying motivations and just respond to the post.
See #607
Hysteria \Hys*te"ri*a\, n. [NL.: cf. F. hyst['e]rie. See Hysteric.] (Med.) A nervous affection, occurring almost exclusively in women, in which the emotional and reflex excitability is exaggerated, and the will power correspondingly diminished, so that the patient loses control over the emotions, becomes the victim of imaginary sensations, and often falls into paroxism or fits. [1913 Webster] Note: The chief symptoms are convulsive, tossing movements of the limbs and head, uncontrollable crying and laughing, and a choking sensation as if a ball were lodged in the throat. The affection presents the most varied symptoms, often simulating those of the gravest diseases, but generally curable by mental treatment alone. Hysteric
This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870 to 1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.