Wednesday, October 15, 2003

.ELSEWHERE

"It's hard work being a left-wing kook these days. On top of anti- globalization demonstrations and anti-war protests, there is always some new issue to organize. This month it is 'Take Back Your Time Day,' scheduled for Oct. 24. Originated by the rabidly left-wing Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University, the goal of this effort is to force employers to give workers more paid time off."

Dennis Prager has a good point: “Whatever your politics, you have to be oblivious to reality to deny that America today is torn by ideological divisions as deep as those of the Civil War era. We are, in fact, in the midst of the Second American Civil War.”

Green crooks: “Now comes a study, "Green-Peace, Dirty Money: Tax Violations in the World of non-Profits," from Public Interest Watch demonstrating the importance of scrutinizing non-profits. PIW charges the activist environmental group Greenpeace with misusing tax-exempt donations for political purposes. Greenpeace, it says, is "the most egregious offender we reviewed"“

I am pleased to see that Frank Furedi, one of my fellow-graduates from the University of Sydney Psychology Department, has a new book out. It's a good one too: Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age. There is a review here: "With its criticisms of the 'growth industry' of counselling and the spread of concepts such as 'self-esteem', the book has received strong interest across the political spectrum in the UK, and will be welcomed on both sides of the Atlantic by people disturbed by aspects of our shrink society".

Leftists are so frantically opposed to the existing "system" in society that they have long been fascinated by the fact that conservatives do accept legitimate forms of authority in society. The Leftists are convinced that this must be deeply psychopathological and have been trying for the last 50 years to prove it -- without success. My latest academic upload is about this. I in fact had only a minor role in the paper concerned -- I helped an elderly colleague to write up some data to which he already had access. The sample was a high quality one -- a random sample of a large city -- and the major finding was that neither pro-authority nor anti-authority views showed any correlation with psychopathology that was worth speaking about -- except for one thing: Anti-authority people were much less intelligent! Needless to say, no Leftist to my knowledge has ever acknowledged THAT finding! See here or here.

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