Leftism as the politics of hate

The article below is from a few years back but it is a vivid confirmation "from the inside" of all I have been saying about  Leftist hate and elitism

Danusha V. Goska lists "Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist"

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying "Eat the Rich." To me it wasn't a metaphor.

I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It's an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors' meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said "Yes" or "No."

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. X." Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists' announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can't climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X's desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others' pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this -- "Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant." But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one's history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. "You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture's rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation."

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, "binders full of women." He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their "war on women."

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I'm not saying that that outrage does not exist. I'm saying I never saw it.

The left's selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It's an "I hate" phenomenon, rather than an "I love" phenomenon.

8.) It's the thought that counts

My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: "Think Globally; Screw up Locally." In other words, "Love Humanity but Hate People."

It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:

"If you want your dream to be,

Build it slow and surely.

Small beginnings greater ends.

Heartfelt work grows purely."

I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan's San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.

Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that's what we leftists do wrong. That's what we've got to get right.

We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and "tolerance," not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.

Peace Corps did not focus on the "small beginnings" necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. "Only intolerant oppressors judge others' cultures."

I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people's clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love." Delousing homeless people's clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.

Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state's first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?

Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she'd never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.

A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton "took me through Hell" and "lied like a dog." "I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all," the woman said. "If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys."

Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.

Hillary's chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.

7) Leftists hate my people.

I'm a working-class Bohunk [central European]. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

Karl Marx promised the workers' paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class -- think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.

Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan's 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.

In the end, though, we didn't show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood -- "Workers of the world, unite!" But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn't adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. "Property is theft" is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.

Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn't just ancient history. In 2004, What's the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what's good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What's the Matter with America?

We became the left's boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we'd been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the "imperialist" war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on "All in the Family." Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.

Leftists freely label poor whites as "redneck," "white trash," "trailer trash," and "hillbilly." At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton's advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."

The left's visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a "major shock" to discover "the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people." The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists "hate-fuck conservative women" and denounces Palin as a "small town hickoid" who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.

Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald's, must accept that he is a recipient of "white privilege" – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard's George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called "America’s leading immigration economist." Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America's working poor.

It's more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.

6) I believe in God.

Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a "dead Jew on a stick" or a "zombie" and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented "flying spaghetti monster." You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

5 & 4) Straw men and "In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs."

It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.

"Truth is that which serves the party." The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.

Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York's WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn't such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, "And you support that?"

Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.

On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post's credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a "family friend" of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, "making stuff up."

Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents -- including Muslims -- from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.

2 & 3) It doesn't work.  Other approaches work better.

I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.

Ouch.

I grew up among "Greatest Generation" Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, "As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit." In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends' parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.

Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state's open wound.

I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don't know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don't realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don't know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.

My students do know -- because they have been taught this -- that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know -- because they have been drilled in this -- that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.

In Dominque La Pierre's 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. "In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you."

That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.

After I realized that our approaches don't work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue's castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is "My God, he's right."

1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I'd stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I'd had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you'd quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled "What do you view as disgusting about modern America?" The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn't hold any anti-war rally, because you didn't hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances -- I had no right-wing friends -- expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I'm not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don't know that they were. I'm speaking here, merely, about language.

In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn't work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.

A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as "Bushitler." The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it's not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.

I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would -- car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my "eat the rich" lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.

In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn't president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.

I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone -- even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health -- meant a great deal to me.

Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, "No, I'm not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody."

"Julie," I said, "You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don't. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something -- capitalism."

"Yes, but I'm very nice about it," she insisted. "I always protest with a smile."

Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I'm sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don't know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.

I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I've stumbled upon a left-wing website.

Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being "sex positive," one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like "fag," so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like "butt hurt." Leftists taunt right-wingers as "tea baggers." The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.

Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was "prone." Carmichael's misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist's reply to a woman critic. "I will make you a rape victim if you don't fuck off... I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I'm going to rape you with my fist."

A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC's Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment's loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won't repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir's comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.

I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I'll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.

I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.

SOURCE

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Leftists never learn

I reproduce below an article by some VERY uncritical thinkers. What they write reveals their thinking to be just about the same as the thinking of Adorno et al. in 1950.   The great mass of criticism and refutation thrown at the Adorno work (See for instance the first half of Altemeyer's first book) has had no impact on them at all.

But there is a reason for that. In the minds of most psychologists, the Adorno work is impervious to criticism.  No matter how aware they are of the criticisms and refutations of it: Its conclusions are just too delicious to let it go.  In the best projective style, it accuses conservatives of all the faults that liberals themselves have, such as authoritarianism.  Its conclusions are emotionally irresistible.  So the authors below are not alone in continuing to produce "research" that repeats the old catnip.  They quote many others who have not learned from the criticisms either.  Their article is in fact mainstream among Leftist psychologists.

But it takes only a  moment of inspection to show that the latest study, like most before it, is entirely reliant on value judgments.  What seem like sober empirical findings are in fact all "spin".  As is so common among psychologists, they take some highly detailed laboratory task and draw huge conclusions about all humanity from it.  They do not rest at saying that liberals and conservatives respond differently to a particular experimental task but rather claim with great expansiveness that this shows how conservatives think generally.

And they do it all on the basis of responses from an available group of university students -- and students have often been shown as responding very differently from the population at large. The authors conclude that "liberals" behave in a certain way rather than "A non-random selection of 44 students from Northwestern university" behaved in a certain way.  In the absence of representative sampling the latter is the only conclusion they are entitled to draw from their data but they are far more expansive than that.

But two can play at their silly game.  Where they conclude that:

"Liberals solved significantly more problems via insight instead of in a step-by-step analytic fashion"

I would conclude from the same set of results that liberals leap to conclusions whereas conservatives are more careful.  Broadly, "conservatism=caution" so that is hardly a startling conclusion.

An amusing feature of the article is that they accept that liberals have a need for novelty.  They are sensation seekers.  I reported the same many years ago -- and my sample was a random one.  I interpreted the finding as showing that liberals are impulsive airheads but the authors below seem to see it as a good thing.  "De gustibus non disputandum est", I guess.

REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950) The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University Manitoba Press.


The politics of insight

Carola Salvi et al.

Abstract

Previous studies showed that liberals and conservatives differ in cognitive style. Liberals are more flexible, and tolerant of complexity and novelty, whereas conservatives are more rigid, are more resistant to change, and prefer clear answers. We administered a set of compound remote associate problems, a task extensively used to differentiate problem-solving styles (via insight or analysis). Using this task, several researches have proven that self-reports, which differentiate between insight and analytic problem-solving, are reliable and are associated with two different neural circuits. In our research we found that participants self-identifying with distinct political orientations demonstrated differences in problem-solving strategy. Liberals solved significantly more problems via insight instead of in a step-by-step analytic fashion. Our findings extend previous observations that self-identified political orientations reflect differences in cognitive styles. More specifically, we show that type of political orientation is associated with problem-solving strategy. The data converge with previous neurobehavioural and cognitive studies indicating a link between cognitive style and the psychological mechanisms that mediate political beliefs.

Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2016 Jun; 69(6): 1064–1072. doi:  10.1080/17470218.2015.1136338

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The Greatest Threat to America Isn’t Islam – It’s the Left

These days, many people are anxious about the threat that Islam poses to the West. The fear is understandable but misplaced. And there are a host of reasons why this proves to be true.

Islam is a religion stuck in pre-medieval times and has rarely produced any civilizational, scientific or technological advancements. Around 40 percent of Muslims worldwide are illiterate. Muslim nations are unable to manufacture even the most elementary of things without the aid of Western engineering, knowledge, and technology. To a great and powerful civilization, Islam can never pose a threat.

The only reason Islam was ever able to conquer two-thirds of the Christian territories after the death of Muhammed was because the Roman and Persian empires had weakened themselves and each other through centuries of warfare. Also, plague and famine had decimated the population in the Mediterranean region, leaving them vulnerable to attack.

The problems we are now facing with Islam are only symptoms of the left’s success in paralyzing the West and preventing it from asserting itself. Islam was never strong. The West has become weak.  That is why fear of Islam is misplaced. The real enemy of the West is the ideological left, an adversary from within which slowly but surely destroys western civilization by debilitating its cultural and political immune system. In many ways, the left is like HIV, and Islam is like a cold. A cold is annoying but hardly life-threatening to someone with a healthy immune system. To someone ravaged by the HIV, however, even a common cold can be lethal.

For more than a century, the left has waged a relentless jihad on the West. In the 19th century, Karl Marx saw Christianity as the cultural carrier and defender of capitalism and launched an intentional attack on religion in general, and Christianity in particular. He believed that, if Christian values could be undermined, it would be much easier to replace capitalism with utopian socialism. As an articulate intellectual, Karl Marx attracted many academics to his cause, and gradually left-wing radicals took over western universities. From this position of intellectual power, they were slowly able to poison the minds of most young people by feeding them lies that effectually turned them into enemies of their own civilization.

The left has been insidious in accomplishing this feat by subtly rewriting academic history textbooks. Today, most positive elements of Western civilization have been erased from academia. Modern students do not learn that capitalism raised billions of people out of poverty and that every single day hundreds of thousands enter the middle class around the globe, thanks to free market economics.

At the same time, negative occurrences about other cultures have been carefully removed. Ask an average student in university, and he will know nothing about the one hundred million people who were effectively murdered under communist totalitarianism. He has not been made aware that almost all places that suffer from poverty in the world are governed by left-wing, anti-capitalistic regimes.

Instead, leftist professors teach only about the vices and atrocities that have occurred in our own history. As a student, you will learn that the West became rich due to slavery and imperialism, but they will never teach that slavery was endemic to all cultures across the world, and that it was Western Christian nations which ultimately abolished slavery.

University professors proclaim all the wealth of the West was stolen from innocent, peaceful cultures around the world. Students are taught that whites are fundamentally racist, but it will go unsaid that all these cultures from which we allegedly stole our wealth had been dirt poor for thousands of years and any racism that existed in the West pales in comparison to that of other cultures.

The professors may not use words like “evil,” but it isn’t necessary. Students infer this conclusion on their own based on the deceptions they are fed. They deduce that the West in general, and specifically the United States, must be destroyed so that all the other respectable and decent cultures of the world can blossom again to create the nirvana that existed before our ruthless impoverishment and exploitation.

The worst part is that decent conservatives and libertarians across the world have allowed this to happen practically without moral resistance. Why? The left has found the great weakness of conservatives: their conscience and decency. When someone accuses them of being racist or some other form of evil, their reflex is to apologize and appease. The more conservatives placate and soothe, the louder the left screams racism – because it works.

The cultural decay of our civilization will continue until conservatives choose to stand up and say “enough.” And the first step in what will certainly be a long process of restoring respect for American culture and values is to quit apologizing and cease pacifying the left.

SOURCE

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No, Trump Is Not a Neocon

BY: RICH LOWRY

With U.S. missiles flying in Syria, the “mother of all bombs” exploding in Afghanistan, and an aircraft-carrier strike group heading toward North Korea, has there been a revolution in President Trump’s foreign policy?

His most fervent supporters shouldn’t get overly exercised and his interventionist critics shouldn’t get too excited. What has been on offer so far is broadly consistent with the Jacksonian worldview that is the core of Trump’s posture toward the world.

Trump’s views are obviously inchoate. He has an attitude rather than a doctrine, and upon leaving office, he surely won’t, like Richard Nixon, write a series of books on international affairs.

What we have learned since he took office is that Trump is not an isolationist. At times, he’s sounded like one. His America First slogan (inadvertently) harkened back to the movement to keep us out of World War II. His outlandish questioning of the NATO alliance, an anchor of the West, created the sense that he might be willing to overturn the foundations of the post–World War II order.

This hasn’t come to pass. It’s not possible to be a truly isolationist president of the United States in the 21st century unless you want to spend all your time unspooling U.S. commitments and managing the resulting disruption and crises. And such an approach would undercut the most consistent element of Trump’s approach — namely strength.

His set-piece foreign-policy speeches during the campaign were clear on this. “The world is most peaceful and most prosperous when America is strongest,” he said last April at the Center for the National Interest. “America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself, but to play the role, we must make America strong again.”

In direct contradiction to isolationism, he said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would take the war to ISIS and build up our defenses. He even called himself — in a malapropism — “the most militaristic person you will ever meet.”

Now, there is no doubt that the Syrian strike is a notable departure for Trump, and he defended it in unapologetically humanitarian terms. But it’s entirely possible that the strike will only have the narrow purpose of reestablishing a red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria and reasserting American credibility.

That is particularly important in the context of the brewing showdown with North Korea, which he roughly forecast in his speech last April. “President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands further and further with its nuclear reach,” Trump said, advocating using economic pressure on China to “get them to do what they have to do with North Korea, which is totally out of control.”

The Tomahawks in Syria and saber-rattling at North Korea have Trump’s critics on the right and left claiming he’s becoming a neoconservative — a term of abuse that is most poorly understood by the people most inclined to use it. All neocons may be hawks, but not all hawks are neocons, who are distinctive in their idealism and robust interventionism.

We haven’t heard paeans to democracy from Trump, or clarion calls for human rights. He hasn’t seriously embraced regime change anywhere (even if his foreign-policy officials say Assad has to go). He shows no sign of a willingness to make a major commitment of U.S. ground troops abroad.

Trump is a particular kind of hawk. The Jacksonian school is inclined toward realism and reluctant to use force, except when a national interest is clearly at stake. As historian Walter Russell Mead writes, “Jacksonians believe that international life is and will remain both violent and anarchic. The United States must be vigilant, strongly armed. Our diplomacy must be cunning, forceful, and no more scrupulous than any other country’s.”

This tradition isn’t isolationist or neoconservative, and neither is Trump.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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This is appalling.  You don't hit a mother carrying babies.  The thug must be locked up



An American Airlines flight attendant has been filmed challenging a passenger to a fight in heated scenes after the staffer allegedly whacked a mum with a stroller and kicked her off the plane.

The woman had just boarded a flight yesterday afternoon from San Francisco to Dallas when the shocking incident occurred.

Passengers allege the attendant "violently" took a stroller from a lady with twins - hitting her and just missing one of the babies.

The incident comes amid the debate over airline boarding treatment after the United Airlines furore involving a man being dragged off a flight in Chicago.

In the American Airlines incident yesterday, a video posted to Facebook by Surain Adyanthaya caught the tumultuous aftermath.

“OMG! AA Flight attendant violently took a stroller from a lady with her baby on my flight, hitting her and just missing the baby,” Adyanthaya captioned the video.

The passenger later added another photo: "They just in-voluntarily escorted the mother and her kids off the flight and let the flight attendant back on, who tried to fight other passengers.

"The mom asked for an apology and the AA official declined.

"I have videos of this too but we are taking off."

The footage doesn’t catch the moment when the flight attendant allegedly struck the woman.

But the atmosphere in the cabin turns turbulent as a man steps in to defend her.

“Hey bud, you do that to me and I’ll knock you flat,” the man says to the attendant as the distraught woman can be seen to the side clutching her baby, tears streaming down her face.

The attendant fires back: “You stay out of this.”

The man then takes a step forward and the attendant immediately turns confrontational. “Hit me, c’mon, bring it on!” the attendant shouts. “C’mon, you don’t know what the story is.”

The passenger responds: “I don’t care what the story is, you don’t hurt a baby.”

The woman is eventually escorted off the flight, but the quarrelsome attendant is allowed back on, the New York Daily News reports.

The Facebook video quickly spread across social media, and had been shared more than 3,500 times as of early Saturday.

American Airlines condemned the flight attendant’s behaviour and said it had launched an investigation into the incident.

“What we see on this video does not reflect our values or how we care for our customers,” the airline said in a statement.

“We are deeply sorry for the pain we have caused this passenger and her family and to any other customers affected by the incident.”

American said the woman and her baby have since boarded another flight bound for an international destination.

The attendant has been removed from duty pending an investigation. “We are disappointed by these actions,” American said.

SOURCE

Leftists Detest Patriotism

An NBC sports writer complains that flags and the national anthem are injecting politics into the game.

NBC Sports writer Craig Calcaterra stirred a hornet’s nest this past weekend when he took to Twitter to complain about the injection of politics in sports. “Will you keep politics out of sports, please. We like sports to be politics-free.” By which he meant the American flag and national anthem, because he tweeted it with a picture of the Atlanta Braves' new stadium during the national anthem.

Calcaterra followed up his tweet with an essay on the NBC Sports website in which he claimed that the presence of American flags and patriotic imagery in sports is part of a post-9/11 “conspicuous patriotism” meant to evoke specific feelings in sports fans.

Maybe Calcaterra would like to file his complaint with the Marine who carried a flag all the way through the Boston Marathon — on a prosthetic leg.

Of course, American Patriots realize that it’s Calcaterra who’s guilty of mixing politics and sports. The display at the Braves game, and many like it at ballparks across the country, are patriotic displays meant to show support for our country and our military. This sort of thing has been going on at sporting events for generations. Despite what Calcaterra thinks, there is no Orwellian propaganda machine at work.

Sports fans are generally a patriotic lot. Calcaterra discovered this in the responses his tweet generated in the hours and days after he posted it. Many challenged his thinking, wondering what was so political about displaying the American flag and being patriotic. One of Calcaterra’s snarky replies was that “People often wrap themselves in the flag in order to achieve political ends.”

People often burn the flag for the same reason, but when flags are displayed in sports, there is no political end to achieve. America-hating leftists can’t seem to grasp that. For them, everything is political. And their inherently thin skin leads them to believe that there is some hidden agenda behind anything they can’t understand. No wonder they’re so bitter.

Take a look at the farce that was Colin Kaepernick’s protest last football season. Kaepernick claimed that he refused to stand during the playing of the National Anthem to show his solidarity for the mistreatment of black people by police. One could argue that Kaepernick’s sentiment to protest such abuse was well-intentioned, but he showed extremely poor judgment by directing his anger at America as a whole and not simply at those responsible for real abuse.

Kaepernick’s error quickly and roundly drew the ire of football fans, and he now sits jobless on the sidelines waiting to see if he will even be picked up by a team for next season. Rumor has it that no NFL team will touch him after the whole debacle.

Leftists are finding themselves increasingly marginalized in America either because they cannot grasp the true meaning of patriotism or because they are terrible at hiding their outright loathing for America. Perhaps it’s a combination of the two. Either way, they seem to want the flexibility to embrace patriotism and the American ideal when it suits them, mainly so they have something to hide behind when they show their contempt for this country and many of its time-honored institutions.

The difference between what is patriotic and what is anti-American should be easy to see, so it’s puzzling that there is such a vigorous debate over the issue. But leftists will keep that argument going because it’s in their nature.

It would just be nice if they can keep that debate out of sports. We Americans like baseball, football, basketball, and all the other contests because we admire physical skill and athletic prowess. We’re not looking for more social justice warriors. Hollywood, Washington and the mass media have given us more than enough of them to go around. Sports is one of the few things in American life that is inherently politics-free. That’s why we like sports. Let’s keep it that way.

SOURCE

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Big Labor Robs Members to Support Democrats

If you’re wondering why millions of workers are abandoning the idea of unionization, this statistic provides a clear answer: At least $1.7 billion — three-quarters of which came straight out of workers' pockets — was used to promote 2016 political campaigns, according to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.

Two things stick out in the report. 1): “labor unions, which have the ability to tax employees via forced-dues, [are] the only 501(c)5 entities capable of sustaining this kind political expenditure for the past decade”; and 2): “Union officials spent $1.3 billion directly from union treasuries (filled with forced dues and fees) to spend it on politics, dwarfing George Soros' and the Koch Brothers' reported combined political spending during the same period.”

Democrats talk a lot talk about voters “making their voices heard” by “getting out the vote,” but most of this money is being siphoned from workers who don’t have a voice in how political contributions are allocated. And, needless to say, Democrats are the biggest beneficiaries. The most recent data reveals that just 14.6 million Americans (or 10.7% of the workforce) were unionized last year. This is a 9.4% reduction from 1983, when membership was 17.7 million (a participation rate of 20.1%). This might explain why, according to The Washington Free Beacon, there is a disparity between Big Labor’s political activism and the votes cast by subordinates: “Trump received votes from 43 percent of union households, while garnering two endorsements from unions representing Border Patrol agents and police officers.”

As National Right to Work Foundation’s Mark Mix put it, “This election was a case study in the disconnect between union bosses and their members, and the chasm is growing.” If unions truly believed in the idea of democracy, they’d quit forcing members to fund partisan politics.

SOURCE

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Net Neutrality Noise and Its Ultimate Goal: Total Government Control

For over a decade, professional liberal organizers and agitators – backed by a tidal wave of big liberal foundations and Silicon Valley corporate money – have told a bizarre scare story that without heavy-handed government regulation, Internet service providers (ISPs) will start blocking what websites you can go to and impeding free speech on the Internet.  No such thing happened in the approximately two decades that ISPs were unregulated “information services” under the 1996 Telecom Act. Indeed, the opposite occurred as robust competition between phone and cable companies – and later wireless companies – drove speeds dramatically higher and consumers benefited from an Internet that innovated beyond our wildest dreams.

Nonetheless, in 2015, ultraliberal advocacy groups (fueled by $196 million from the Soros and Ford Foundations) and Silicon Valley giants like Google (which cycled a shocking 250 personnel through the Obama administration and saw regulating ISPs as a way to guarantee themselves access to below-market rate downstream bandwidth for their YouTube unit) succeeded in getting the FCC to reclassify ISPs as regulated public utilities. This was done under a Depression-era law designed for the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly.  Thousands of complaints to potentially micromanage every aspect of the Internet piled up at the FCC Enforcement Bureau and the commission was set to adopt a sweeping new broadband tax to replace the private investment it scared off – with strings attached of course – during a Hillary Clinton administration.

The liberal organizers of the phony net neutrality scare campaign had even bigger plans; Robert McChesney, the founder of Free Press – the group that was cited 46 times in the Obama net neutrality order – openly bragged: “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

If that’s too subtle for you, McChesney also said: “In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”

The American people elected Donald Trump, and President Trump elevated free-market champion Ajit Pai to be FCC chairman and undo the mischief the Obama FCC had done before it could reach its ultimate goals.

Chairman Pai is soon expected to unveil his plan to undo the Obama order and replace it with a light-touch approach that centers on competition and consumer protection and allows government intervention only when there is actual consumer harm – not just scare stories.  And in a refreshing break from the usual pattern of regulators accruing to themselves as much power as possible, the Pai plan will probably relinquish authority from his own agency to the Federal Trade Commission, which has far better expertise in consumer protection and competition issues.

To the well-funded groups on the left that created the phony net neutrality issue as a pretext for a government takeover of the Internet, any step back will be unacceptable and the apocalyptic rhetoric will flow like water.  They will again have hundreds of millions of dollars and massive platforms from the Silicon Valley giants like Google that supported the Obama regulations.  And the liberal media will happily jump on board every vicious smear and lie to tarnish Chairman Pai and President Trump and try to spook Congress into reversing course.  Some conservatives may be tempted to simply ride the tide of fake outrage.  But that can only lead to McChesney’s ultimate goal of total government control.  On this issue, conservatives in Washington D.C. must do what they were elected to do: stand and fight. And win.

SOURCE

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The Ugly Face of Sharia Law in America

Two recent reports underscore the danger of being ambivalent toward Western values.

According to The Detroit News, a middle-aged doctor by the name of Jumana Nagarwala has been arrested for illegally conducting female genital mutilation on two minors. Additionally, the Detroit Free Press reports that “an attorney for [Nagarwala] admitted that her client performed a procedure on the juveniles' private parts, but maintained that it wasn’t cutting. Instead, the lawyer said Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, 44, of Northville, removed the membrane from the girls' genitals as part of a religious practice that is tied to an international Indian-Muslim group that the doctor belongs to.” This spin doesn’t make the incidents any less horrendous. In fact, the minors were instructed not to divulge anything about the ordeal. And without the FBI’s involvement, the malefactors might have gotten away with it.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Abdullah Rashid is “trying to impose what he calls ‘the civil part of the sharia law’ in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis,” according to the StarTribune. His enforcement measures include ordering people to avoid alcohol and drugs, soliciting “indecent” females to wear Muslim garb, and encouraging folks not to socialize with the opposite sex. If there’s any good news it’s that the Tribune says “local Muslim leaders are sounding the alarm. They are working to stop Rashid’s group, General Presidency of the Religious Affairs and Welfare of the Ummah, and have notified Minneapolis police, who say he’s being banned from a Cedar-Riverside property.” But these Islam-inspired shenanigans aren’t new, particularly in Minneapolis. The problem is only getting worse.

We don’t know if Nagarwala is an immigrant (though presumably she is), and reports indicate Rashid is a Georgia native. But in both cases, they are being influenced by an ideology that’s prevalent in Islamic nations. The immigration debate — an issue in which both the Democrat and Republican Parties once found common ground — has turned into one of the most politically divisive topics. The Left arduously advocates open borders, which it says is about compassion and inclusivility. But that view is either misguided or politically calculated or both. What leftists completely disregard is the idea of assimilation. And without assimilation, the stories above with continue to metastasize.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Scientific proof that Trump voters are racist?

Excerpt below from Thomas Wood, an assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University.  Tom may know a lot about political science but he knows nothing about psychometrics. Both his measure of authoritarianism and his measure of racism have no known validity at predicting actual behaviour in the general population.

Rather hilariously, The Stenner scale of "authoritarianism"  is embarassingly INVALID. That may be because  it is in a "forced-choice" format that makes it difficult for many people to report their views accurately. It has been PROCLAIMED as a measure of authoritarianism but there is no proof that it is.  More on that here

And the Symbolic Racism scale is problematic in what it defines as racism. Its items could in fact be seen as simply true or false hypotheses. Take, for instance the item:

"Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class".

That is a Leftist credo but where is the evidence for it?  That it is a false statement could reasonably be concluded from the fact that many other initially disadvantaged minorities have in fact worked their way up to prosperity.

So is it racist to acknowledge reality?  Leftists seem to think it is but everything they disagree with is racist to them so that tells us nothing. The scale results could in fact tell us that Trump voters are more open to reality.



One also wonders why results from only 4 out of the 8 items of the Symbolic Racism scale were presented.  Were results from the other four less congenial to the beliefs of the writer?

But in any case the scale is known only to predict other attitudes, not any aspect of actual behaviour.  The results below therefore tell us nothing firm


During the 2016 presidential campaign, many observers wondered exactly what motivated voters most: Was it income? Authoritarianism? Racial attitudes?

Let the analyses begin. Last week, the widely respected 2016 American National Election Study was released, sending political scientists into a flurry of data modeling and chart making.

The ANES has been conducted since 1948, at first through in-person surveys, and now also online, with about 1,200 nationally representative respondents answering some questions for about 80 minutes. This incredibly rich, publicly funded data source allows us to put elections into historical perspective, examining how much each factor affected the vote in 2016 compared with other recent elections.

Below, I’ll examine three narratives that became widely accepted about the 2016 election and see how they stack up against the ANES data.

The rich, the poor, and the in-between

The first narrative was about how income affected vote choice. Trump was said to be unusually appealing to low-income voters, especially in the Midwest, compared with recent Republican presidential nominees. True or false?

The ANES provides us data on income and presidential vote choice going back to 1948. To remove the effects of inflation and rising prosperity, I plot the percentage voting for the Republican presidential candidate relative to the overall sample, by where they rank in U.S. income, from the top to the bottom fifth. To most directly test the Donald Trump income hypothesis, I’ve restricted this analysis to white voters.

2016 was plainly an anomaly. While the wealthy are usually most likely to vote for the Republican, they didn’t this time; and while the poor are usually less likely to vote for the Republican, they were unusually supportive of Trump. And the degree to which the wealthy disdained the 2016 Republican candidate was without recent historical precedent.

Authoritarians or not?

Many commentators and social scientists wrote about how much about authoritarianism influenced voters. Authoritarianism, as used by political scientists, isn’t the same as fascism; it’s a psychological disposition in which voters have an aversion to social change and threats to social order. Since respondents might not want to say they fear chaos or are drawn to strong leadership, this disposition is measured by asking voters about the right way to rear children.

The next chart shows how white GOP presidential voters have answered these questions since 2000. As we can see, Trump’s voters appear a little less authoritarian than recent white Republican voters.

Did racism affect the voting?

Many observers debated how important Trump’s racial appeals were to his voters. During the campaign, Trump made overt racial comments, with seemingly little electoral penalty. Could the unusual 2016 race have further affected Americans’ racial attitudes?

To test this, I use what is called the “symbolic racism scale” to compare whites who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate with those who voted for the Republican. This scale measures racial attitudes among respondents who know that it’s socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced. Rather than asking overtly prejudiced questions — “do you believe blacks are lazy” — we ask whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility.....

Finally, the statistical tool of regression can tease apart which had more influence on the 2016 vote: authoritarianism or symbolic racism, after controlling for education, race, ideology, and age. Moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile in the authoritarian scale made someone about 3 percent more likely to vote for Trump. The same jump on the SRS scale made someone 20 percent more likely to vote for Trump.

Racial attitudes made a bigger difference in electing Trump than authoritarianism.

More HERE

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The Willful Subversion of Critical Institutions Threatens America

Certain of our institutions play a critical role in sustaining the republic and promoting and protecting the unique character of the United States of America, and they therefore have a tremendous obligation to operate ethically and honorably. To the extent that they abandon their obligation, the country’s fundamental character is threatened.

Those institutions are the justice system, the education system, and the information media.

Imagine you have a business renting apartments. One of your tenants, who has rented a place for $1,500 a month for three years sends you a check for only $900 for the current month.

You contact the tenant and are told that he views the lease that both you and he signed as a “living document,” the meaning of which may be altered as circumstances change. Having lost the job that paid $73,000 a year, his new job pays only $45,000, and he says he can now only afford $900 rent a month.

That is precisely the rationale that activist judges apply when they abandon the clear language of the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the land to make rulings they say are in line with current circumstances and the “mood” of the country, and because the Founders and those who enacted older laws were unable at that time to imagine current circumstances, that old stuff must be modernized.

However, the laws or constitutional principles that activist judges disagree with must be amended or repealed through existing formal processes, not ignored or altered because they are viewed as inconvenient. If momentary interpretations are all that matter, and the Constitution is merely a “living document,” we don’t have a Constitution and we are not a nation of laws.

A nation needs its history and culture — all of it: the good, the bad, and the ugly — to be passed down from generation to generation so that its people will know who they are and where they came from, and can properly determine where they want to go and why.

While families should pass much of this along to children, we largely entrust this duty to formal education. To guide the learning process and assist students in learning an array of important and useful subjects and life lessons, we employ teachers, professors, instructors and such, who coach and assist students.

Most of us had at least some teachers, professors and coaches who inspired us and helped us learn difficult subject matter, develop our skills, and learn how to think critically and logically. Hopefully, we did not have any that strayed from their professional duties and tried to tell us what to think about things, rather than developing the ability to think for ourselves.

Today, among the great number of effective educators there are too many who stray from the straight and narrow, especially in colleges and universities, where education too often takes a back seat to political and ideological indoctrination and politically correct policies. Imposing beliefs on students is worse than merely disrespecting the student; it is an outright abandonment of integrity and principle.

Along with an accurate base of knowledge about the country’s founding and history presented to them in schools, the people need to be well informed about current events. Information journalism contains two parts, and they must be kept separate. One is news about events, which must be accurate, honest and objective. The other is opinion, and must be clearly defined and omitted from straight news.

But far too often, opinion and political considerations sneak into news reporting, and also into the selection of what news gets reported and how it is reported, as well as what news does not get coverage. This is like playing golf blindfolded. You might find your driver, your ball and a tee, and you might tee up and actually hit the ball, but after that, you are literally in the dark, depending on the honesty of those around you to accurately describe the situation for you.

The American Left has a vision of America that is in many ways sharply at odds with the founding principles. Both beneficial and harmful ideas that the Left pursues are at odds with the ideal of limited government, because using government to force things on the people is the Left’s tool of choice.

Fortunately, there are obstacles to using government to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” as a former leftist president pledged. These obstacles are difficult to remove, as they should be. So the Left resorts not infrequently to re-interpreting the Constitution and the laws; managing and manipulating the information coming through much of the mass media; and sometimes indoctrinating children.

We all need to remember that worthy and broadly beneficial ideas will sell themselves; they don’t need people to take short cuts or cheat to get them accepted.

SOURCE

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On the lighter side

Just about everyone likes the Music of Strauss the younger but we often hear the music only, without realizing that there are words to go with it.  An example is  "Frühlingsstimmen" (Spring voices).  Below is a charming performance of the song by a young Slovak soprano Patricia Janečková. She was only 18 at the time. I liked one of the comments on the performance: "I was captivated for 7 1/2 minutes - she is just great. Then I watched it again - this time, with the speakers on: and she was even better"

I give a translation of the first verse below so you know what it is all about:



The lark rises into the blue,
the mellow wind mildly blowing;
his lovely mild breath revives
and kisses the field, the meadow.
Spring in all its splendour rises,
ah all hardship is over,
sorrow becomes milder,
good expectations,
the belief in happiness returns;
sunshine, you warm us,
ah, all is laughing, oh,oh awakes!

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Leftists attack pro-Trump rally

They are violent people driven by hate

A melee erupted on Saturday in a Berkeley, California park where supporters and opponents of President Donald Trump were holding competing rallies, resulting in at least 20 arrests as police struggled to keep the two camps apart.

As fist fights broke out between the two sides and people threw bottles and cans over a barricade separating them, police resorted to using to an explosive device at one point in a bid to restore order.

Several people were observed by a Reuters reporter with bloodied faces and minor injuries, but there was no official word on casualties from authorities. Media, citing police, reported that at least 11 people were injured.

Police said more arrests could follow after video shot during the melee was reviewed.

The trouble unfolded when hundreds of Trump opponents staged a counter-rally alongside an event billed as a “Patriots Day” free-speech rally and picnic, organized by mostly Trump supporters.

Between 500 and 1,000 people were in the park as the rallies peaked, according to an estimate by a Reuters reporter.

Among the Trump opponents were some counter-protesters dressed in black and wearing masks. The other side included self-described “patriots” and “nationalists”, Trump supporters, free speech advocates, and other groups.

Daryl Tempesta, 52, who said he served in the U.S. Air Force near the end of the Cold War, went to the rally to show his support for Trump.

“As a veteran, I like the track America is on, and that Trump is willing to stand and say we are still America and we are not going to be globalist, we’re not going to be a communist country,” Tempesta said. “That’s a message I can get behind.”

SOURCE

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Donald Trump’s first 100 days better than you would think

AS the end of Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office approaches, now’s a good a time to cut through the fog of misinformation, disinformation, media propaganda, ideological bias and outright hostility that has greeted his arrival in Washington and take a clear-eyed look at how he’s really doing.

Answer: much better than you think.

Let’s take the area that was supposed to be his Achilles’ heel, foreign policy. After flirting publicly with the likes of John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani and David Petraeus, Mr Trump settled on dark horse Rex Tillerson, the former chief of ExxonMobil, to be his secretary of state. Like his boss, Mr Tillerson had no prior experience in government — which has turned out so far to be an excellent thing.

Unencumbered by the can’t-do conventional wisdom of the Foggy Bottom establishment and its parrots in the Washington press corps, Mr Tillerson has played the carrot to Mr Trump’s stick, soothing Chinese feathers ruffled during the campaign with a March visit to Beijing and setting up the successful meeting earlier this month between The Donald and the Chinese president at Mar-a-Largo that coincided with the cruise-missile salvo fired at Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Since then, the Chinese have openly cautioned the troublesome regime of Kim Jong-un in North Korea not to antagonise the US with further nuclear sabre-rattling in the region; “Trump is a man who honours his promises,” warned the People’s Daily, the ruling party’s official newspaper. Among those promises: a better trade deal for China and an ominous presidential tweet to the North Koreans that they’re “looking for trouble,” and signed “USA.” Even now, US warships are steaming Kim’s way.

Regarding Russia, Mr Tillerson rocked the former Soviets with a “frank discussion” in Moscow on Wednesday — diplo-speak for “contentious.” Meanwhile, at the UN, ambassador Nikki Haley has already proven her mettle, taking a hard line toward the Russians for their tactical alliance with Assad while making clear the US commitment to Israel.

Domestically, a first attempt at repealing and replacing ObamaCare flopped when Speaker Paul Ryan’s needlessly complex “better way” couldn’t muster enough GOP votes to make it to the House floor. But the fault was the ambitious Ryan’s. Now the way’s clear for a cleaner repeal. And, yes, tax reform’s on its way, too.

True, the president’s two executive orders regarding visitors from several Muslim countries have been stayed by federal judges refusing to acknowledge the plain letter of both the Constitution and the US Code 1182, which give the president plenary power regarding immigration. But the recent confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as an associate justice will quickly clear up that misunderstanding when the cases land in the Supreme Court.



Further, the Republicans’ use of the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster for high court nominees means Mr Trump’s next pick is guaranteed a speedy confirmation.

Over at the National Security Council, H.R. McMaster has brought order out of the chaos that followed the abortive tenure of Mike Flynn, shuffling some staffers but retaining the services of crucial personnel. And at the Pentagon and Homeland Security, former Marine generals James Mattis and John Kelly can be counted on to faithfully execute presidential policy. Worries that they’re too soft on radical Islam are unfounded.

Less remarked but equally important has been the administration’s speedy action on downsizing the federal government, proposing real spending cuts and reorganising the bloated bureaucracy, which has drawn bleats of protest from the DC swamp creatures watching their sinecures circling the drain. Mr Trump’s also lifted the hiring freeze, in order to flesh out a still-undermanned executive staff and replace Obama holdovers.

Despite these clear successes, the media continues to depict the White House as a floundering, latter-day court of the Borgias, a backstabber behind every arras. But that’s to be expected of a novice administration in its infancy. When the smoke clears, look for an uneasy balance of power between chief counsellor Steve Bannon and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Mr Trump can ill-afford to lose Mr Bannon and his diehard conservative base.

And the sooner the floundering White House press operation is rebooted, the better; the administration has played defence against a hostile, sneering media long enough.

No new president will ever match the whirlwind of new programs introduced by FDR when he took office during the Depression — the gold standard cited by Democrats who equate activity with action. But Mr Trump got elected for precisely the opposite reason: Less government is more freedom.

As long as he keeps that in mind, he — and we — will do just fine.

SOURCE

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Trump Removes the Handcuffs

As the number of Islamic State militants killed by the Massive Ordnance Air Blast or MOAB nears 100, the U.S. as well as the rest of the world is assessing the larger and continued impact of the bomb. The strategic rationale for the using our biggest non-nuclear bomb was sound, as the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan near the border of Pakistan has become a recent hot zone for the U.S. military’s engagement with an off-shoot of Islamic State militants. In this instance, the MOAB eviscerated an elaborate network of jihadi tunnels. Gen. John W. Nicholson stated that MOAB “is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against ISIS.”

In the larger context, MOAB signals a significant change from the last eight years. Barack Obama was no fan of the U.S. military, and while he begrudgingly understood its necessity he did much to limit its ability to engage in effective warfare. Donald Trump’s attitude is markedly different, demonstrated both by his campaign rhetoric in calling for the defeat of America’s enemies and his willingness to back-up his rhetoric by giving military commanders the green light to use necessary force. Significantly, when Trump was asked whether he authorized the bomb itself, the president answered, “What I do is I authorize the military. We have the greatest military in the world, and they’ve done a [good] job as usual. So, we have given them total authorization.”

A few of observations can be noted here. First, Trump has taken the handcuffs off U.S. military leadership, trusting in their expertise to wage effective warfare. Second, Trump believes in winning wars. Wars are won when one side defeats the other, and too often politicians prove to get in the way and end up prolonging war, leading ultimately to more suffering and lost lives. As David French of National Review states, “Excessive American caution has cost American lives and American limbs.” Third, this bomb, coupled with the U.S. bombing of the Syrian air base responsible for launching the chemical attack, sends a clear message to both North Korea and Iran that Trump will use any means necessary, including force, to counter their aggression.

SOURCE

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Immigration Hawks Ascend to Senior DHS Positions

Two leading advocates for reforming illegal and legal immigration enforcement were appointed by President Donald Trump to serve as senior advisors for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Jon Feere, the former legal analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, and Julie Kirchner, the previous executive director for the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), have both been appointed to senior positions.

Feere, who work with the Trump campaign and transition team on immigration policy, will serve as the senior adviser to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency Director Thomas Homan.

Kirchner, a campaign alum as well, will serve as the senior adviser to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan.

Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian told Breitbart Texas that the Trump Administration appointed a person who “knows the ins and outs” of immigration when they chose Feere to serve. “ICE needs somebody like Jon because he’s worked on immigration policy for many years,” Krikorian said. “After eight years of Obama, there were civil servants and people at ICE who weren’t as quite up to date on immigration enforcement.”

FAIR spokesperson Ira Mehlman told Breitbart Texas that Kirchner’s appointment is welcome news. “They’re both people with long experience and deep knowledge and they’re highly qualified for their positions,” Mehlman said.

Both the Center for Immigration Studies and FAIR have long been advocates for increased border security, a wall, reforming foreign guest worker visas and lower levels of legal immigration to help American wages to rise.

The appointments have come with the usual media backlash that the Trump Administration has grown accustomed to. CNN, for instance, has written that Feere and Kirchner’s appointments have “alarmed” the open borders lobby. The network propped up opposition to the appointments through the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, with Director Heidi Beirich claiming that that the Center for Immigration Studies and FAIR publish “racist” and “xenophobic” reports.

Krikorian, though, said the open borders lobby is only outraged because they know how effective both nominees could be. “This isn’t a complaint about qualification,” Krikorian told Breitbart Texas. “Jon and these others know what they’re doing and that’s what the anti-borders groups are afraid of.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Trumping healthcare’s bad hand

Some history lessons and suggestions to improve US healthcare without breaking the bank

By Scot Faulkner (Scot Faulkner was Chief Administrative Officer for the U.S. House of Representatives)

As the White House and Republican leaders continue debates and negotiations on a new bill, the blamestorming continues over the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. Congressional Republicans have only themselves to blame. Since returning to majority in the House in January 2011, Republicans have formally voted 54 times to address all or part of Obamacare. Six were votes on full appeal.

In 2015, H.R. 132 is typical of these efforts.  It simply stated: “such Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.”  Why didn’t Republicans vote on this a few weeks ago?

Republicans did not vote on simply going back in time, because they thought government should play a significant role in healthcare. It should not. Crippling regulations need to be changed and the private sector needs to be encouraged. Last month’s legislation did not clear the way for these solutions.

The Republicans’ problem is squandering six years with legislation designed more for fundraising and campaigning than governing. Instead, they could have viewed their repeal and replace efforts as prototyping or beta-testing a new product or APP. They could have tested ideas and built Republican consensus. Not doing this led to disaster. What to do next?

In 2013, I outlined a patient-centric versus politician-centric approach. Maybe now it will be followed. Those wanting an expanded governmental role in healthcare and those opposing it are fighting the wrong battle in the wrong way.

The debate over national healthcare policy has lasted over a century – intensifying during the Clinton Administration and since Obamacare. It has always been about coverage, liability, and finance, never about care protocols and patients. If making health affordable is everyone’s stated goal, then why not focus on the actual care, health, and wellness of Americans?

America remains the best place on Earth to have an acute illness or shock-trauma injury. Our nation’s emergency rooms and first responder protocols are unequaled. Princess Diana may have lived had her car accident happened in New York City instead of Paris. America’s diagnostic methods and equipment are unequaled. That’s why patients from all over the globe seek answers to complex symptoms by visiting the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Sloan Kettering and countless other world class facilities.

The other side of American healthcare is its failings in chronic care, expense, and a system that is controlled by the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies and insurance industry. This triad of entrenched interests has prevented the widespread use of substances and therapies deemed effective in most of the world.

Thankfully, an increasing number of healthcare professionals are embracing global best practices, virtual technology, and patient-centric methods. Some are even exploring homeopathic and nutritional treatments that are common place around the globe, but viewed as “nontraditional” in America. These innovations are improving the health of patients while driving down costs. This is the arena where policy-makers should check their partisanship at the door. Seeking ways to improve healthcare, not health financing, will ultimately make health affordable to us all.

I have personal experience with the convergence of these worlds. Since 2007, I have been the primary caregiver to several family members with serious chronic conditions. These conditions have been punctuated by emergency care and major surgeries. Making decisions and managing treatment across this spectrum has been a real education that has helped me identify four major areas of opportunity for health and healthcare improvement, while addressing the affordability of private and public health services.

First, not all ailments require doctors and prescription medications. Government and industry policies drive people away from cheaper and more effective natural remedies. Herbal remedies have been successfully used since the first humans. For example, apple cider vinegar has completely solved acid reflex. Cayenne pepper has improved heart function.

However, natural substances are not covered as a medical expense either by insurance or tax deductions. Instead, acid reflex sufferers must pay for over-the-counter treatments (which are also not covered by insurance or tax deductions), or must obtain expensive prescriptions after paying to see a doctor or specialist. Being a natural treatment, the vinegar regime also avoids side effects and drug interactions. Why not go “back to the future” and find ways to support these more affordable and effective treatments?

Second, nurse practitioners form one of the new front lines of care. The overwhelming majority of my family’s office visits are with a nurse practitioner interacting with the patient and lab technicians. Occasionally, a doctor will review the information and discuss treatment options with the patient. Supporting the evolution to nurse practitioners through education, professional certification, protocol modifications and pricing would reduce costs and expand health options for professionals and patients.

Third, community caregiving is another new frontline of achieving and sustaining wellness. In 2009-2011, I was part of the planning team for developing a community-based care system for the Atlanta area. We found a disturbing pattern – patients, especially Medicare/Medicaid patients, arrive in hospital emergency rooms when their chronic conditions (diabetes, congestive heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD, eg) become acute. These patients are treated at the most expensive point of care: emergency room. Once they are released, many do not have the support (family, friends, neighbors) or the capacity (some form of dementia) to follow a treatment regime that would prevent the next emergency room visit. These revolving door patients drive-up costs and end-up in a cycle of deterioration.

Our solution was to develop a community-based healthcare network. Such networks are known as “Accountable Care Organizations” (ACOs). They break-out of traditional hospital and doctor office environments to forge partnerships with the community – churches, social workers, local government, neighbor associations, and nonprofits. A needy patient with chronic conditions is assessed holistically.

This includes risk factors (i.e. smoking, alcoholism, drugs) and environmental factors (family & home environment). A care plan is developed and assigned to a multi-faceted care team (comprising community resources) and a care manager. Doctors and nurses are part of the team. The majority of health actions take place among family and community – driven by electronic medical records, aided by remote sensors and virtual care, and guided by the managed care team.

The result of this holistic approach is improved care, sustainable health and reduced costs. It is the one way Medicare and Medicaid costs can be substantially reduced while enhancing quality of life. There are initiatives to promote this methodology within the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), but it is occurring too slowly and is too isolated. ACOs are making a difference, but no major politician has embraced the concept and neither party has promoted them as a way to reduce Entitlement costs.

Fourth, families have always been a pivotal component in healthcare. Whether it is a parent staying home to care for sick children, or adult children caring for ailing parents, family caregiving is vital; but it is also emotionally and financially draining.

Having been the care manager, medical power of attorney, and patient advocate for both my parents and my wife, I know how much time is spent with ailing family members. Current IRS regulations provide for listing parents as dependents based only upon financial support.

However, there are no tax credits or deductions for those who have the medical power of attorney and devote countless hours to direct care or acting as the patient’s advocate for managing their care. Politicians at both the state and federal levels should provide relief for this indispensable and growing volunteer service sector. Supporting Family-based assistance will save billions in public assistance.

According to the National Alliance of Caregiving, 70 million Americans provide unpaid assistance and support to older people and adults with disabilities. Forty percent of these caregivers provide care for 2-5 years, while approximately 29% provide care for 5-10 years. Unpaid caregiving by family and friends has an estimated national economic value (in 2004) of $306 billion annually – exceeding combined costs for nursing home care ($103.2 billion) and home health care ($36.1 billion). This value is increasing as the population ages.

These four areas of opportunity will not address every health issue or entirely diffuse the fiscal bombs strapped to medical entitlements, but they are a good nonpartisan start. It is time for politicians to focus on the wellbeing of patients, not themselves.

Via email

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Conservatives Must Hate the Poor – Because They Want Less Gov’t

When you’re a conservative, you have to develop a thick skin. You get used to hearing how heartless you are. How devoid of compassion.

And why? Because you don’t automatically support every government program that purports to help poor people. Why, you conservatives must hate poor people!

For our liberal friends, life is simple. “Hey, here’s a social problem,” they’ll say, in essence. “Let’s throw some money at it. That will solve it.” If we disagree, they take it as proof we care more about money than about people.

There’s a certain irony at work here. Sure, money is a concern. After all, scarce resources are being taken, either from the taxpayers or borrowed from future generations. But it isn’t just – or even primarily – the money that bothers us. It's all the regulations, all the big government, that goes along with it.

Because when actual flesh-and-blood people are being considered, when we consider how big government affects human beings, we find many victims of its policies not among the rich, but among the poor.

The problem of big government crops up in many different ways. The rules, the regulations, the fine print – they all affect what you can buy, or how much it costs, or what you can do. They dictate whether you can run a lemonade stand, or sell roses on a street corner, or even just drive a car without having to go through some overly complicated governmental process.

A new Heritage Foundation report, “Big Government Policies that Hurt the Poor and How to Address Them,” outlines the phenomenon in detail. One of the charts shows exactly why big government amounts to misplaced compassion – the one that shows household spending as a percent of after-tax income.

It’s broken down by income quintiles, and guess what? Government data show incontrovertibly that it is the poor who pay the biggest percentage of their income for things such as housing, food, clothing, electricity and gasoline. So when regulations and other government policies jack up the cost of these items, the poor are the ones hit the hardest. Not those of us who are fortunate enough to have done better and moved up the income ladder.

When we’re dealing with big, intrusive government, we need to forget about good intentions. Instead, let’s focus on how it adversely impacts people at the lower end of the income spectrum.

We don’t need another program. What we need is for government to get out of the way. Stop intervening. Stop requiring people to do certain things, whether it is to attend cosmetology school to become hair-braiders, or to stop them in other ways from making their own economic decisions – which they, obviously, are in the best position to make.

It may seem hard for big-government advocates to realize, but I know how to spend my own money better than some faceless bureaucrat does. I believe that frustration on this point has done much to create the new economic era and the new political era in which we find ourselves today.

This isn’t a new concept. The welfare studies we were doing 20 years ago addressed the same kind of question. We wanted to know how to rethink the dozens of means-tested welfare programs that are out there in a way that encouraged economic opportunity for all Americans, no matter what their income.

We succeeded, and the great welfare reform of 1996 led to some real and significant changes. I hope that this latest study will bring some significant changes as well.

“Government is not the solution to our problem,” Ronald Reagan said. “Government is the problem.” The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can help all Americans – especially the poor.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Liberalism and Low Self Esteem

The article below from late last year by Sean Last makes points that I have been making for many years -- though I allow that he expresses it better than I have.  I think it was first in 2002 that I pointed out that Leftism is clearly motivated by ego needs.  Leftism makes Leftists feel good -- as being wise and caring, whether or not they actually are, and mostly they are not.  And Leftists are shallow enough to NEED that boost -- which is why they run away from any information that might undermine their half-baked policy preferences of the day.

But there is more than one  source for Leftism and I have outlined many here.  I actually think that the needy egos have hopped onto a train that had already been got rolling by others:  The haters.  As the huge demonstrations against Trump show, Leftists are huge haters.  And their hate is primarily directed at the society in which they live.  They want to destroy it, in the delusion that they can create a better society.  So anybody who wants to make America great is anathema to them.

A better society can indeed be created.  From the industrial revolution on, society has become richer and kinder and more capable of improving human lives.  But none of that was done by Leftist policies of expropriation and destruction.  It was done by the steady accumulation of human wisdom and ingenuity that a capitalist society enabled and produced.  Other societies did well only insofar as they copied capitalist societies.

So the hatred that Leftists have for the society in which they live is at best impatient and at worst blind.  There is much to criticize about modern society but Leftists want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  They fail to see that a better society is steadily evolving out of our existing society and that attacks on existing society are therefore attacks on the only hope for the future.

When Leftists do get the opportunity to mould a whole society into what they think is desirable, all we get are ghastly tyrannies like the Soviets, Mao's China, Pol Pot in Cambodia and the dead hand of Castro's Cuba.

But the hate thrives nonetheless.  Why?  It can have many causes.  It can be a traditional hate for "the bosses" that we see in places like Scotland, it could come from some personal deprivation, like being born into a very poor family, or it could be the expression of a pathological personality.  Karl Marx hated just about everyone and that is said to be because for most of his life he had painful boils on his butt.

But by far the most obvious source for a personality that is full of hate from birth onwards is psychopathy.  I have in fact had academic journal articles published which report research into psychopathy so I have enough knowledge of psychopathy to see how startling are the parallels between psychopathy and Leftism.  I go into details here

To summarize briefly, Psychopaths love only themselves and hate anyone who does not take them at their own high valuation of themselves and have no real morality or ethics whatsoever.  They are masters of "faking good" -- of saying things that they think will make them look and sound good regardless of any truth in it.  They lie at the drop of a hat.  So they are very shallow thinkers.  Only the here and now exists to them.  I think that is a pretty good description of most prominent Leftists. Getting principles or even consistency out of a Leftist is a mug's game.  They will say one thing one day and something else the next day.  He/she will say anything that makes him/her look good on the given occasion. Obama's 180 degree turn on homosexual marriage is a good example of that.  Or Bill Clinton's claim that Hillary was named after Sir Edmund, the Everest hero.

So that is where the needful ego guy comes in.  He is not necessarily fully psychopathic but he shares the psychopath's need for praise and ego boosting. He jumps onto the psychopathic train being run by prominent Leftists.  I set out here the reasons why  the Clintons, Barack Obama and John Kerry are clear cases of psychopathy -- JR


In this post I am going to argue that one important reason why many people adopt a liberal political ideology is that it boosts their self esteem by allowing liberals to view themselves as noble warriors in a great battle against evil. There is a good deal of empirical data which is consistent with this theory. But I will also be making use of some evidence which is purely anecdotal. I fully recognize the limitations of such data. But I am still going to talk about it because it adds something meaningful to this theory.

The first question that needs answering is why liberals would need to increase their self-esteem in a way that conservatives do not. The answer is simple: liberals have less self esteem than conservatives to begin with. This is the conclusion of a 2012 paper published in the Journal of Research on Personality. The paper included two studies that found that liberals had lower self esteem than conservatives. The first study’s sample was moderate in size and consisted of college students. The second study made use of decades of data from the General Social Survey. The GSS is a large and highly representative survey that has been administered in the United States for over 40 years. Another paper published in 2014 replicated this finding in two more samples. Thus, the finding that liberals have low self esteem has been replicated several times, including one replication with an extremely high quality sample.

There is also experimental evidence showing that self esteem has a causal relation to liberalism. Researchers from Stanford have shown that causing people to feel especially good, or bad, about their looks influences their political beliefs and behavior. The researchers manipulated how people felt about themselves by asking them to recall incidents in which they felt either very attractive or very unattractive. When participants were made to feel good about themselves they became more likely to believe that social inequality was caused by individual differences in talent rather than by systemic forces outside of the individuals control. That is, they became more likely to endorse the conservative view on inequality. They also became less likely to donate to organizations aimed at lessening social inequality. When participants were made to feel poorly about themselves the opposite happened: they adopted a more liberal worldview and were more likely to donate to liberal groups.

So far we know that liberals have low self esteem and that having low self esteem causes people to be more liberal. There are at least two ways of looking at this. One way is to say that having low self esteem causes someone to be liberal because it makes it rational for them to favor equality. Equality helps everyone on the bottom half and that’s probably where you think you are if you have low self esteem. There’s clearly some truth to this narrative. But I believe that people with low self esteem will also be attracted to liberalism because being a liberal helps your self esteem a little bit. In particular, being a liberal lets you view yourself as a kind of moral hero waging a battle against dark and evil forces. Who doesn’t feel good about themselves while playing super hero?

The thing that initially caused me to think that liberalism boosts self esteem is the fact that liberals seem to be very proud of their political ideology. They want everyone to know about it. You can tell someone is liberal by the car they drive, the clothes they wear, and the food they eat. Non-liberals aren’t normally like this. I can’t look at someone and know whether they are a moderate, a conservative, a libertarian, etc. It’s only liberals that I can reliably spot on sight.

It also seems clear to me that morality is involved. Liberals are always crusading against something immoral. It’s never a simple factual disagreement. Conservatives are sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. And they hate the poor. Of course, many of these charges are ridiculous. For example, conservatives advocate the economic policies they do because they think that everyone will benefit from them. It has nothing to do with hating the poor. Notice that conservatives don’t respond in kind: conservatives don’t normally argue that liberals hate the poor, women, straight people or minorities, even though they think that liberal policies will negatively effect these groups.

Research by the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt lends support to this theory. Haidt has developed surveys that ask people about their moral values. Early in his research Haidt found that liberals and conservatives tended to fill out these surveys differently. After replicating this finding several times Haidt did something pretty cool: he had liberals fill out the surveys as they imagined conservatives would and vice versa. Haidt found that conservatives were fairly accurate in their depictions of the moral values of liberals. But liberals were widely inaccurate in their view of conservative morality: they drastically underestimated how much conservatives cared about moral values like fairness and kindness. Haidt also had liberals fill out the surveys as if they were the average liberal and conservatives fill out the surveys as if they were the average conservative. Once again, conservatives were far more accurate than liberals. Liberals consistently over-estimated how much the average liberal cared about various moral values. And thus, Haidt showed that liberals irrationally view conservatives as immoral and view themselves as far more righteous than they actually are.

The behavior of liberals is also consistent with viewing them as moral crusaders. Pew polling shows that liberals are far more likely than conservatives to end a friendship with someone due to a political dispute. This is what we would expect from people who view the opposition as evil. Who wants to be friends with evil people?

I think this explains why liberals care so much about things that are offensive and don’t matter. If you want to feel morally superior to everyone around you, you can’t agree with them. And so you have to find things wrong with society which society won’t admit to. And so as time has gone on, liberals have had to invent increasingly ridiculous complaints about society. Consider transsexuals and people with autism. By even the most liberal estimates of transsexual prevalence, autism is about five times as common as trannies are. And no one could argue with the fact that autistic people have hard lives. But the left doesn’t generally care about people with autism because supporting autistic people isn’t offensive to most people. If the left launched a campaign to help autistic people most people would probably feel sorry for the mentally ill and agree with them. And then there would be no bogey men to wage war with. So the left concentrates on trannies instead. There are basically no trannies. And most of the few that do exist are clearly insane. So they are the perfect group for the left to champion. A lesser but similar case can be made about gay marriage. Being gay is rare, and almost no gays actually want to marry. But gay marriage is offensive to many people. So it is a great issue for the left. It creates lots of bogeymen.

I’ve found that this theory helps to explain a lot about how liberals debate. In my experience, liberals are more concerned with proving that I am evil than proving that I am wrong. (“The races differ in mean IQ scores.” … “You’re racist!”) I now think that this is because they can only grandstand by showing that I am evil. Showing that I am wrong won’t boost their self esteem the way that showing to the world that they are battling evil does.

In summary, studies show that liberals have low self esteem and that causing low self esteem causes people to be more liberal. Research also shows that liberals have unrealistically negative views of the morals of conservatives and unrealistically positive views of the morals of liberals. And polling shows that liberals are far more likely to break social ties with people over politics. They are moral crusaders. The fact that liberals want everyone to know that they are liberal, that they seem to purposefully pick offensive views, their debate style, and the fact that being morally superior normally feels pretty good, suggests to me that the moral crusading and the low self esteem are connected. Liberals are liberal so that they can say that society sucks, so that they can say that they are better than everyone else, so that they can feel a little less shitty about themselves.

SOURCE

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The Strategic Calculations Behind Trump's Flip-Flops

Headlines splashed across much of the mainstream media on Thursday morning stated that essentially Donald Trump had flipped his position on several campaign issues. Two of Trump’s policy changes were highlighted by the following headlines: Bloomberg’s headline, “Trump’s Reversal on China Currency His Latest Abandoned Promise” and the other in the Washington Post’s headline, “Trump on NATO: ‘I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.’”

Given Trump’s typical off-the-cuff manner, it’s tempting to assume that he’s sliding into the realm of all flip-flopping politicians, but the truth — at least in these two cases — is more nuanced. In the case of China, Trump can’t think of its currency in a vacuum, but as part of his effort to contain North Korea. The U.S. and China will have to cooperate to some extent, meaning labeling China a currency manipulator is off the table for now. And as for NATO, a huge part of Trump’s strategy in Syria is to put pressure on Vladimir Putin. NATO is key in that calculation, thus it’s “no longer obsolete” — just as we argued from the beginning.

As with every campaign, the rhetoric of the politician is often overly simplistic, designed to present big picture issues in the most appealing way, while avoiding getting bogged down in the minutia of truly complex issues. Trump, like Barack Obama before him, proved to be skillful at connecting with Americans in getting his base message out clearly — “Make America Great Again.”

But unlike Obama, Trump truly was a non-establishment Washington outsider. Like anyone coming into a new job, there are things learned once on the job that can prove to change one’s perspective. To some degree, Trump is learning on the job, as have all presidents before him, but it would be naïve to suggest that Trump’s apparent flip-flop in policy position is due entirely to his newfound experience of being in office. Trump is a business man who is more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. He understands negotiating tactics — knowing when to “hold and when to fold.” And unlike Obama, Trump appears to truly listen to and trust the expertise of his cabinet and advisers.

On a final note, Trump’s shifting rhetoric on both China and NATO are encouraging and wise moves, but neither necessarily indicates that he has actually changed his policy position. This type of talking tough and then moving to the middle ground may have been his intention from the beginning.

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