Jimmy Carter and Unconscious Hate

Post below recycled from Shrinkwrapped. See the original for links

Manifest behavior is always the summation of competing wishes and inhibitions, most of which are unconscious. When someone makes a great show of his personal piety yet his manifest behavior is often damaging to others, it is worth wondering if he is expressing forbidden unconscious wishes in ways that are disguised and acceptable to himself. Jimmy Carter, our nation's worst ex-President, offers an excellent case in point.

Carter describes himself as a friend of Israel, only interested in Peace in the Middle East and the world. Yet he is now planning to meet with Khaled Meshal, one of the leaders of Hamas, an agent of genocide, in Damascus, the capital of a terror supporting and enabling state which oppresses its own people in ways that the left's fantasies of the Bush administration's tortures cannot even approach. While many believe, and he grants copious evidence to support the belief, that Jimmy Carter is in part motivated by anti-Semitism, let us take him at his word that he is not an anti-Semite and is in fact motivated solely by a desire for peace and love. What are the implications of such a position?

First of all, it is an impossibility. The Pope correctly beatifies those few individuals who live lives of such virtue and selflessness that we can truly believe they are containers of minimal stores of hate. For the rest of us merely human, our reptilian brains (midbrian and hindbrain) are filled with aggression, hate, lust, rage, and all manner of emotions unacceptable to civilized men and women. As I have pointed out before, the input descending from the most recent parts of the brain, the neocortex, is predominantly inhibitory on the lower strata of roiling emotions. Much of the chore of remaining civilized has to do with modulating the expression of those emotions and the behaviors that they would motivate.....

When one, instead of recognizing and metabolizing his hatreds and aggressive drives, denies their existence, they continue to live on in the unconscious, empowered by the denial. The expression of such denied aggression can be seen in the Preacher who is "holier than thou" and takes great pleasure in condemning the sinner to eternal torment. Some will happily supply details of the unimaginable torments (easily imagined by the Preacher) of those unfortunate consigned to the Preacher's vision of Hell.

Jimmy Carter is the Godfather of the modern leftist hater. He presents a pious mien, untroubled by rage or hate. He truly sees himself as a man of peace. Yet Hamas is openly and unapologetically genocidal. Jimmy Carter hates through others -- [thus] maintaining deniability of his own monstrous impulses. His evil is worse than the banality Hannah Arendt described because he should know better. The compartmentalization required to embrace the murderers of innocents while proclaiming their moderation is breath taking yet never seems to give pause to our ex-President. Jimmy Carter is a hate filled and bitter man and every effort he makes seems to support monsters. It is a mystery only to him.

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ELSEWHERE

A brilliant takedown of Hillary supporters here

I am inclined to think that this stuff is beneath contempt but I will mention it anyway. The EU is sponsoring a project to find out why people are religious! The aim, no doubt, is to show that religious people are either mentally defective or deranged. I was very religious in my teens but have been an atheist for all my adult life and it seems to me that if you want to know why people are religious you just have to ask religious people. They will always tell you that it just makes sense for there to be a God. Human beings by their nature seek explanations for things so it is just a part of being human to seek explanations for our own existence. And it didn't take me millions of euros to find that out! Explanations can be wrong however and I am happy to say: "I don't know".

The only useful response to the economic shakeout: "... to bring a quick end to this recession, the best thing the United States can do is get out of the way of the entrepreneur. If government must act, it should make entrepreneurship more attractive and more viable for more Americans. It could relieve new start-up businesses of some of the tax burdens they face at the state and local level. It might relax labor rules for new firms for the first few years. It could create an expanded program of wage insurance for displaced workers. (Such a system would create a stronger incentive for finding work than the current system of unemployment benefits and, from the entrepreneur's perspective, might boost the velocity of workers eager to augment their skills or learn new ones on the job.)"

Vulture politics on the left: "On April 18, 2007, a series of five car bombs hit Baghdad, killing almost 200 people. Showing his customary lack of restraint and his trademark political opportunism, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, attempted to score partisan points. Seeking out a gaggle of press microphones the next day, Reid proclaimed, "This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week." Reid's comments, so close on the heels of a massacre, provided a tidy snapshot of how the vultures of the left operate. Whether in the blogosphere, the mainstream media, or even the U.S. Senate, they wait for bad news from Iraq and then swoop in with abandon to derive political benefit from a tragedy. Reid's declaration of defeat would be an especially poignant embarrassment were the left capable of embarrassment. First of all, the intemperate and ludicrously premature comments in question came not from some 20-something blogger but from the Senate majority leader. And Reid was audaciously careless with the facts. When he declared the surge a failure in April 2007, it hadn't even fully begun. A large portion of the surge troops had yet to arrive in Iraq."

McCain has a shot in Massachusetts: "Can a Republican presidential candidate win Massachusetts? In most years, because of the state's dark blue reputation, the answer clearly would be no. But if the race is between John McCain and Barack Obama, there is an opportunity for a Republican to claim Massachusetts's 12 electoral votes. This opportunity exists because of the respective appeal of McCain and Obama to the true dominant political "party" in Massachusetts - the independents."

Lying Leftist British politician: "Des Browne, the defence secretary, appears to have misled MPs when he told them an independent report had ruled that the RAF's Nimrod aircraft were safe to fly. Browne made the claim while apologising to relatives of 14 men killed when leaking fuel led to an explosion which destroyed a Nimrod spy plane over Afghanistan in September 2006. A copy of the independent report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that it found the aircraft did not comply with the Ministry of Defence's own safety rules. The report, produced by QinetiQ in March last year, was highly critical, making 30 recommendations that had to be carried out before the aircraft could be deemed to be safe."

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A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is a recent example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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